


trial by combat

by gogollescent



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-25
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 15:12:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/980402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scenes from the mêlée.</p>
<p>“The gods know the truth of my innocence. I will have their verdict, not the judgment of men.” —Tyrion Lannister, <i>A Game of Thrones</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. THE MAIDEN & WARRIOR

**Author's Note:**

> I came so close to calling this "A Match Made In Seven." 
> 
> Warnings for a messy abortion, domestic abuse, sibling abuse, and all the other good stuff that comes with Cersei/Robert, in addition to the standard AO3 tags above. I am obliged to Kat and Pip for going through this with a fine-toothed comb and cleaning out the worst of my rogue punctuation.

She rode out with him under a sun as faint as some full moons, whose reduced sphere showed pearly through its coat of graying cloud. The Stark colors were an omen she would recall with perfect insight: though she made little of them at the time, except to note that wintry skies set off terrestrial pomp. A still cold day, the air like brackish water—but you could see to the procession's last acrobat, and all the beggars beyond.

“Cersei, by the gods,” said her kingly groom, when they had reached the sept. The only words he spoke to anyone until the cloaks were exchanged. He seemed restive. His hand caressed her jaw like half a helm. Up close, indoors, she could not read his face with the same assurance she had felt from afar—his features leached of meaning by nearness, and the blue eyes quite obscure. One thought, or she did, of a running animal, its extraneous grace. Lion or stag: by speed alone you might not guess who hunted and who hied.

In fact he was leaning forward to fasten the brooch at her throat. It was a process she observed with some misgivings, knowing how black and cloth-of-gold would dim a fair complexion. As well don widow’s weeds as royal splendor, in this new age. Still. The king was pleased, you could see that much. His late betrothed had been the flower of the North; he’d probably gotten a taste for waxy-wan.

She said her lines, not quite absently, and he echoed her. “…with this kiss, I pledge my love.” A forceful pledge. Also wet: his tongue thick on her teeth. The septon said, “I do solemnly proclaim Robert of House Baratheon and Cersei of House Lannister to be man and wife, one flesh, one heart, one soul, now and forever, and cursed be the one who comes between.”

 _Cursed_ , Jaime had said, hours ago in her chamber. Not kindly, he pronounced the _e_. This while curled catlike among the cushions, his sandy hair tamped flat by sweat, and his head on her knee an anchor against weightlessness: the eerie feeling that took her at times, after they coupled, as though her flesh were only skin and air. As if, scooped hollow, she would drift up and lodge between the rafters, there to peer down emptily on the wreckage they'd made of the room. The linen-strewn floor, the disastrous bed. A sculptor's cast for what he was to her.

She had stroked his hair. How young he'd seemed! with the edge of one ear splaying out from his skull, and his red mouth shelled with light. He kissed the bulk of her calf, eyelashes pricking muscle, and she pushed him out of her lap and rose onto sore knees. She had to, and could not, believe that she looked just that young. When he rolled to his back, she slung one leg over him, to hide his grin—and so that he could kiss a road up her tense, aching thigh.

But that was the morning. Now, the king escorted her to the hall where they would feast.

They were all there, the mighty lords, and survivors enriched by circumstance. Ned Stark sat immediately to the left of the dais, and Jon Arryn, Hand of the King, was acquainting himself with a doubtless long-awaited Arbor red on the far right. Mace Tyrell and Hoster Tully took places nearer the doors, and had even struck up a minimum of conversation, stiffer than her twin’s cock on winter mornings. For her father she cast about in vain through the first course. He would be somewhere, overseeing final adjustments, but he derived no enjoyment from frivolities or small talk, and perhaps preferred to keep apart from the crowded trestle tables, the music and laughter… she was smiling, she realized, so broadly it hurt.

Her husband smiled too. Said, “I've got the awful sense that they want us to lead the dances.”

Cersei could not think of him as anything but _the king_. Robert Baratheon, first of his name. Less comely than Rhaegar, more comely than Rhaegar's charred corpse. Handsome in his own right: but desirable, beyond that barrier, because of what had ended for her to have his hand, and she observed him with skeptical greed, as land conquered but never yet mapped. “Nothing would please me more,” she said, soft.

They went out across the deserted carpet. Murmurs blew round their footfalls like snow, though it was spring—spring again, after that false first budding, and the freeze that followed it, and the war. Two years and more ago. She took his hand and listened.

The music began.

In an impatient ecstasy of motion he would have outstepped the instruments, if she had not restrained him. His feet turning round like a man beset. Only when he dropped his neck to the yoke of her white arms did he seem to remember that he was no more a rebel, that Cersei was his partner and not his enemy. By then others had followed them onto the floor. “You're very beautiful, my lady,” said the king, and she thought, save it; or what will we discuss when we're in bed?

But she couldn't resist praise she knew to be just. “You're too kind, Your Grace.”

“Seven hells, don't call me _that_. You're my wife.” He said it with some force, and looked worried: she was tempted to feign shock. Settled instead for an understanding nod.

“Robert,” she said. “And you must call me by my name as well.” Though she wouldn't have minded the title, or the one she'd have when she was crowned.

Robert seemed to have something else on his mind. His hands descended to her waist, too low for decency, thumb skimming the peak of her hip. She looked at him from under her lashes and shoved up into his palm—artless, but she let her lips part too, to bare her teeth. He met her gaze.

And:

Her husband was angry, she saw, with sudden unease. So much so that she thought she’d been mad not to know it. To miss the dark flush, and the line of his mouth; or his fine, far eyes, hot as the lash of summer lightning, that with a touch could turn the world blue.

But her certainty flew from her. In the next moment, when he laughed, he was only a man who had drunk too much and eaten too little, and he picked her up and spun her like she supposed he must his hammer. She was breathing hard by the time he set her down. His subjects had wisely made room, and they stood at the center of an expanding void, the design on the carpet laid out clear at their feet; while behind her ribs her heart still thrummed, like a harpstring plucked and shaking when the player's hand had ceased. The fealty, inviolate, of ripples to a stone.

 

It was an unconvivial bedding, despite the crowd. Many of the young men she had known were dead; it meant little to her of itself, but she saw them severely tallied in the faces of the high lords who undressed her. Closer to her father's generation than her brother's, they joked over her head even when unlacing her bodice, and she viewed them, without wishing to, from a child's bitter remove, as she had watched her mother take away Jaime when they were small. There was a chasm: she could not bridge it. Not by giggling or taking offense, or pushing high her breasts in half-convincing bids at modesty. Or by lying dumb and corpselike on the bier of their rough arms.

There being no worthier occupation to hand, she studied them. Someone was enjoining her not to play with the king before she ate his—inaudible. Someone farther to the back muttered, not lewdly, about the tardiness of lions. A third voice asked whether Lannisters produced children as quickly as they killed them. His anonymity, alas, was preserved by the uproar. Loudest by her ear: _The maid's not bloody Tywin._

But I am, she could have said. I am his heir, and one day you'll all see it, if I have to devour my own babes. Did they imagine she didn't know on whose word the Targaryens died?

True, she had spent the war at Casterly Rock, locked up with Tyrion: but when it stopped she went back to Jaime, who dreamed each night of burning. She had heard him ask, with eyes closed, for water or blood, a sea to drown the pyromancer's flames. Perhaps she was innocent of battle and butchery, but she'd woken the Kingslayer with her mouth, and felt his silence as a chink in their happiness, through which any foul thing might crawl. And she had vomited up her breakfast when she heard the whole of Rhaeger's death. Her father had refused to tell her how, where, but though Jaime hadn't been there he could describe every detail. One blow, delivered from horseback in the shallows of the Trident; rubies floating on the river like buds, for the moment it took them to sink. At a stroke she'd lost and gained a husband, even if the loss existed in just her father's mind, in hers. She was as much bereaved as any veteran commander.

And yet—they were approaching the top of the tower. Jaime had not appeared. She was down to her smallclothes, her skirts a rose in white somewhere below, and the calloused hands under her knees took on beastly dimensions. She had enjoyed the adulation of the city, riding through the streets on a litter; but this was like slipping from paw to paw. Or was it, still, their indifference that bruised her, and the fear that after all it was well-earned? She was only a girl. She had not mourned their sons, or Elia's children, or anything but Jaime's unbroken sleep, and her high hopes. Rhaegar in the Trident, hair slopping like snow from his three-horned helmet—men said there was honor in duty, not hunger, but looking up at the weary, wine-blurred eyes of the most illustrious men in the realm, she was more than ever sure that she deserved to gorge herself. What did they dream of? burnt kings, or their gone comrades? When she, a maid, razed castles while she slept, and conjured armies greater than all those the dead could field.

Look at me, she would have screamed, had they not been outside of Robert's chamber. Look at me, my lords, for I will rule you. I am your war's reward.

 

And then she was alone.

There was Robert, of course, but a king hardly counted as company. She sat up, holding the sheets to her collarbone, and he watched her with a kind of surprised interest, his fingers drumming the velvet of his pillow. “Randy old biddies,” he said, of the women who'd deposited him next to her. To Cersei's eyes they had been merely insipid. “Not that I imagine your lot was much better. Tell me true, who will I want to geld come the morrow?”

She lowered her eyes, and he laughed. “Come here,” he said. He lay on his arm, hand outstretched and open; she approached and was pulled to his lap. He kissed her ear. The stink of wine companioned his embrace, but his lips on her earlobe made her shiver, and his fingers kept her face away from his. He had none of Jaime's peculiar delicacy; she could have searched him for years without unearthing a trace of herself. Except… he bent to nuzzle her sternum. In candlelight his coal-black hair had poached a tawny sheen.

“Oh,” she sighed, “oh, I,” rocking against his cock, which pushed taut the linen over her crotch. He put his mouth over her left nipple and bit the underside. His hand, throughout, was in her hair, smoothing the silky curls at her temple, covering them. And without warning he flipped her to her back.

She would have preferred to straddle him for longer; but he kissed her from throat to cunt, single-minded as a man gutting game, and having ended between her thighs he sucked her wet nub till she twitched. “Get on with it,” she said shortly, face hot and damp. Jaime would have taken her brusqueness for a compliment, but her husband directed a hurt look at her teats and drew away. Probably his dogged tongue had received a warmer welcome from whores, who for a coin would term His Grace inventor of the art.

“As my lady commands.” He yanked her smallclothes down and entered her.

He was bigger than Jaime, below as above. When she yelped it was no perjuring. He took her wrist and kissed it, as if they were dancing still, and she a girl not flowered—murmured his encouragement, grinning now in earnest, and though she could have rolled her eyes she felt disquieted. She was remembering the anger she’d seen when they danced in truth. Her husband pinned her arm above her head, the long arch of his back shading her nakedness; he held her hand and her cunt, but though he hedged her in on every side, it did not seem to her they elsewhere met. He had closed his eyes. After two minutes' hasty rutting he pulled out and turned her over, against what babbled protest she gave, and slid an arm under her hips and fucked her from behind. It occurred to her that she might have been wise to take pleasure while he'd struggled to give it.

She mastered herself. He was rearranging her hair, for some reason. From the distracted, clumsy tenor of his touch, Cersei supposed he must be close to the end. But he kept on, spilling only gasps. Once his breath hitched like he would hold back tears. More and more he seemed distant to her senses, and when he pressed a knuckle up the hood of her slit she realized she also neared an edge.

He was talking.

“Gods, you're tight.” Naturally she was, compared to the sluts of the Vale—until he came along, the only cock she took was one that should have been her own. “Oh, Maiden have mercy—ah, my love, my poor true queen—

“Lyanna,” he said then, with his cock softening inside her.

For a moment she didn't truly comprehend it: the name and the despair in it, crystalline and shameless. Then, when she did understand, she found herself thinking of other things. Not of Robert but her family, some of whom might yet be standing on the other side of the door. Their guests, their _subjects_ , were meant to have been providing them with lecherous advice, and only then did Cersei realize that the walls of the royal apartment must be too thick for sound to penetrate. She was not grateful, although she was glad they had not heard him… she was sure they couldn't have heard.

If her father knew, he would tell her she'd failed. She should have been prouder, more glittering, incontrovertibly herself. Or he would say, what matter? The Stark girl holds court in a crypt. And that was all, she said to herself, that was all I saw in him. What she’d taken for rage had been mere misery. Cersei remembered Jaime's nightmares, and the thin cheer of the men who'd carried her to this ghost-crowded bed. For so long she had thought that to be inevitable was to be loved like Jaime loved her. She had thought that no one bound to her could want for anything.

Robert moved off her back. His hand crept to the inside of her thigh, but she forced shut her legs against his fingers, and he didn't persist. “My lord has quite exhausted me,” she said. When she was calm enough to raise her head, she discovered him already asleep. He hadn't troubled to cover himself. Her eye fell, like a too-soft blow, on the healing scar that adorned his left shoulder—he had not till now shown her his pink back.

She hadn't planned to counterfeit a stain. A rider of Lyanna Stark's reputation might have had a better excuse for her already-broken maidenhead, but no one had questioned Cersei Lannister's virtue while she was Lord Tywin's daughter, and they wouldn't start now she was queen. In the wake of newfound understanding, however, she left the bed and took a table knife from the sideboard. She went to her unconscious husband and cut into the scar. Under her narrow palms and the wine's aegis, he did not wake, or even stir, while she whetted her claws on his back. He had cloaked her in black and gold; she smeared the sheets with red.

 

* * *

 

Joffrey was two.

“Little villain never stops screaming,” Robert said, but he did when his kingly father lifted him onto his knee, closing the wet mouth in a snap. “Ah, did I really sow such sullen seed?” It was typical of him to complain of noise and quiet in one breath, but then the sudden hush irked Cersei, too. As an infant the boy had cried in Robert's arms, and she could see no reason for change. She wondered whether Joff acknowledged Robert's sovereignty.

“Give him here,” she said, but Robert ignored her in favor of peeling the boy's lips to probe the erupted molars.

“Still teething? Is it just me, or should he have more fangs than a lizard lion, after all this time?”

“Grand Maester Pycelle says these are the last of his milk teeth,” Cersei said. “I have prayed for the pain to abate.”

He gave her a skeptical look, as was his custom when she referred to her public devotions. She wasn't sure if he was conscious of insincerity, or only sick of prayer; a feeling she shared, it was true, but unlike him she had the wits to linger in the sept. She had knelt to him, a less sweet-smelling idol, though she imagined that if he could suck his own balls he would do so joyfully. He was the sort of man who might have liked to be made more in the image of dogs, and less of gods.

“He'd best learn to bite back a little pain.”

“He's a prince,” said Cersei. “No one will harm him.”

“Tell that to Balon Greyjoy,” said Robert darkly, and in confluence with his melodrama there came a faint knock on the door. “Grave news, Your Grace,” said Varys through the woodwork.

Robert handed Joffrey to Cersei, and went out to speak with the eunuch—he didn't know that Varys was loyal to his queen, and would tell her when they were alone. But even that proved unnecessary. Robert said, “He wants an iron seat that badly? He can have my bloody warhammer up his arse, then,” in a voice half the castle must have heard. When he came back Cersei gifted him with her sincerest smile.

“They burned the fleet at Lannisport,” he said.

Her father would be irritated. “And you ride west the sooner.”

“No need to sound so pleased about it,” he said, but he couldn't disguise his idiot joy, and he kissed her without regard for their son in her arms. Joffrey resumed his fussing, but after Robert had left he said, “Fleet?”

His first word had been _no_ ; his second, _dada_. “Boats,” said Cersei, combing four fingers through his curls. “Burning boats.”

 

She returned to her solar and sent for Jaime. “Break your fast with me, brother,” she said when he arrived, and nodded at the Lannister armsman who stood guard in the hall. “You may leave your post for an hour. Ser Jaime will protect me.” Then, when he looked torn: “No word will reach your captain, I assure you. Go!”

Jaime waited until he had to step inside. He was dishevelled and dusty, his face smudged like a boy's, and his leather jerkin and old boots made her think he'd been training squires. It was hard to know: he didn't offer an excuse for his appearance, but absently pressed a kiss to the skin beneath her eye, warm and close-mouthed, the sharp tang of his sweat like opening a window in a dark room, and being shocked to blindness by the sun. “Where's Joffrey?” he asked, and seemed unduly pleased when she told him the prince was in care of his nurse.

“You might at least visit him,” she said. “You're his uncle. It's not unheard-of for a man to spend time with his nephew.”

“It wouldn't prevent me if it were,” said Jaime, stealing a spoonful of her porridge. “I do all manner of unheard-of things. Didn't you just banish your own guard to spare his ears?” He snaked a hand around to cup the back of her thigh and yank her forward, his fingers hooking in against the line of her skirt. “Unfortunately, toddlers are boring.” He kissed her neck.

“Joffrey is your prince,” said Cersei, incensed. “And your—”

Jaime smiled and pulled away, his hands hanging in the air between them as though poised to block a blow. “All right,” he said. “He's a fine boy. Is he talking yet?”

“Since before his last name day,” Cersei said, and Jaime looked at her with pity in his eyes. She would have told him to take himself back to his squires, but tomorrow he would be leaving beside the king, she knew, and might be gone for months: even a year. Instead she made him sit and regaled him with Joff's latest accomplishments over the cooling table. She talked until she could feel his frustration like humidity, and went on a little longer, to provoke him, and to see his expression cycle from kindness to lust, like the moon sharpening as it waned. Finally he stood and went to her, knocking over the honey in his hurry. It was too easy for him to drag her chair around and push her skirts up to her waist, heedless of the nails she dug half-seriously into his wrist, and he knelt before her legs and licked the dry skin of her taint. “For gods' sakes,” she said, trying to sit up and get off her tailbone, but he was intent on petty vengeance. His tongue edged up against her slit without pushing into her.

She kicked his shoulder, and Jaime removed his hands to grasp her heel. Cersei seized the opportunity to sit up and press his mouth higher, hard against her quim. “Mmph,” said Jaime, arms bent carelessly back; he let go of her ankle, slid his hands under her hips, and pulled her forward off the chair, folding her into his lap.

It was absurd. _He_ was absurd. With knees raised and feet framing his waist, the infinite skirts rucked up to her belly, she felt a gangling child, as she had never done while she was one. “Sweet sister,” said Jaime, kissing her with two hands at her nape. He was still fully clothed and filthy from the training yard, and he tasted of her, which was more accurate to the substance of her memories. His sweet quick mouth—Joffrey's mouth too, yielding and pink, but then it suited Joffrey's unformed face, where on Jaime it had the viciousness of one truth in a forest of lies. She thought of dragging him down to suckle at her breast, but it was good to feel his fingers cage her head, the clever clean fit of his lips against hers; and when she opened her eyes, and looked past the eclipse of his body, she saw them move like one event in the chamber's standing mirror. Fair-haired and many-armed.

She fucked him after. By the time they both had had their fill they were on their backs and panting. Exposed under the light of noon, they touched nowhere, and breathed the dust they'd beaten from the rushes. Cersei was first to rally; she rolled onto her side and reached across his ribs to tweak his nipple. “You're getting old,” she teased. “You used to give me hell.” They had turned twenty-three a month before. Robert threw a tourney to celebrate the date. His blessing, Jaime had called it.

“As I recall,” said Jaime now, “you paid that debt with interest.” He dropped his chin to his collarbone in a futile attempt at kissing her hand, or possibly biting it. She got up and walked to the table, where the overturned honey was pooling sluggishly, the flow too unhurried to mark. The rest of the meal sat mostly untouched, the dishes glittering, narrow shelves of shadow at the bottom of each bowl, with a tablecloth whiter than old ice where it was clean. She ate a piece of the honeycomb and picked up the sticky pot.

“Don't put that on me,” said Jaime warningly, when she came to sit beside her fallen swain. “Some of us have pelts, and I don't think getting honey out of chest hair—”

“Shh,” said Cersei. She carved out a glob with her little finger and extended it for him to taste. He narrowed his eyes at her, but sucked it off, and brightened with comical quickness. When she pulled back her hand he followed, rising up off the floor to close his teeth around the end of the finger, and she felt a tug of renewed arousal, though it came stripped of its first urgency. She sat back on her haunches and freed her hand to grab his chin, examining him as she might have a horse. He remained in all things like her. Even his hair, cropped for the imminent heat, served only to make obvious the lean length of his throat. And she had tresses enough for two, anyway. Waves of gold swung loose to feather on his shoulder, when she kissed him at the corner of one cheek.

“We should dress,” she said. “My husband will be too busy readying himself for war to hector me, but at some point he may begin to wonder where _you_ are.”

“Let him,” said Jaime lazily, catching her arm. “I'll kill him and say it was an assassin sent by Balon Greyjoy. Like the shadow of a squid, I'll say.”

“Let him get himself killed,” said Cersei. “It should be easy enough. I've heard that in battle he's like a charging bull.”

“And when was the last time you saw a battle?” Jaime said, in a voice more like their father’s than any he’d yet used. Cersei bristled. He wasn't looking, however, at her face; he laid a hand on her shoulder, his thumb stretching to the top of her breast, and let go only to rub a length of her hair between two fingers, as if for luck. “Robert didn't kill Rhaegar by charging him."

"You said—"

He seemed to lose patience with the topic, all at once. "Never mind. He'll win this war. Which you should be grateful for, unless you want to swap out your diadem for driftwood.”

“Don't tell me our _king_ is the only thing standing between the ironborn and the Iron Throne.”

“Well, no,” said Jaime, mock contemplative. “There's always me.”

She slapped his hand away. “Perhaps you should go fuck him, then. You can compare battle strategies.” She lifted his cock and pretended to weigh it. “Yours is skinnier.”

But when he climbed to his feet she regretted her ire. He was ivory or weirwood in the engulfing sun, barely gilded even at the crown, and so much a part of her that she would have swallowed him whole to keep him safe. Robert was not the only one who might die away at war. She never thought of Jaime as vulnerable to the wrath of other men, but if she had learned anything in her life that she hadn't believed from birth, it was that rebellions were unexacting plagues. Not just the mad, the rash, the ugly, and the weak, but too the finest bud of every tree; leaving Robert, burning Rhaegar as straw. Involuntarily she thought of Lyanna. “Don't go,” she said: and saw pity rise again, like rebellion had, in Jaime's spring-pale glance.

 

His squire said Robert had repaired to the armory. Cersei took Joffrey with her. He walked most of the way himself, her brave boy, and when he flagged she let him wrap his arms around her neck and carried him.

She found Robert testing the edge of a dirk with a stoat skull for a pommel. It was an oddly womanish affair: the concentration on his bare face, and the smile that came when he drew blood. “Don't you have people for this?” she asked, looking around at the rows of organized steel. “Squires?”

“A man should choose his own blade.” Robert held the dagger out hilt-first. To her, she thought, for a foolish moment, but of course he was offering it to Joffrey.

“He'll hurt himself,” she said. “He's too young.”

Robert seemed not to hear. “A sword just your size, eh?” he said to Joffrey, waggling it. “Want sword,” said Joffrey, but he didn't snatch at the dagger, to her relief; his small fingers stayed curled against her nape while his eyes tracked the skull. “Face!” he added, leaning far enough out of her arms that she had to shift her grip to his stomach.

“Well,” said Robert, “he's not afraid of bones, at least.” He slid the dirk back onto its shelf. “My queen. What is it you wanted?”

“You set out tomorrow.”

“Aye, if I can get Jon to stop moaning about the retinue. My knights can follow me at their Seven-damned leisure, and pick over the corpses should they miss the bloody fight.”

“Let Jaime stay here.” No. “ _Make_ him stay. With you gone, and the kingdoms at war, I won't rest easy unless the prince has his uncle to protect him.”

“Is that all?” Robert frowned. “I'm leaving you with a full complement of guardsmen. Balon Greyjoy is on the other side of the continent, and unless he teaches his boats to walk…” He made to circumvent her, and she placed a restraining hand on his chest.

“The Kingsguard should protect the royal family,” she said, fiddling with a button on his doublet.

“The Kingsguard protects the king,” said Robert with a snort. “Not that I'm surprised your brother forgot.” He batted her hand away. “Did he put you up to this?”

“No, he—”

“Good. I'm doing him a favor, you know. Bringing him with me.” Unexpectedly, he took Joffrey from her. She would not have permitted it, but it happened so quickly, and Joff went so willingly to Robert; Robert helped him climb up over his shoulder, and he perched there, clutching the massive head like a goat clinging to an outcropping of stone. They were a pretty picture. The jewel-bright child, his coarse-haired mount. Cersei controlled her anger, and smiled up at them both.

Robert spoke again. “If he pulls off a few choice deeds—”

“—he's the best knight in the Seven Kingdoms, of course he can, of course he will—”

“—then maybe he can win a sweeter name than Kingslayer.”

“A Targaryen king. You could execute anyone who calls him so for treason.”

“And kill half the city? _I_ call him that. It's what he is. But he'll go to war. Otherwise, how will his fellow knights ever trust him again? When he's hiding behind his sister's skirts, far away from any stabbable royalty, like he can't stand the lure?”

“I am the queen,” Cersei said. “Your son is royalty. Or had you forgotten?”

“So he is,” said Robert, looking at Joffrey as though he would have preferred to see a pig boy, or the bastard of one of his whores. “He couldn't be anything else.”

“He's a babe.” Joffrey shrank back, and she reached for him, but Robert caught her wrists. “Let go of me,” Cersei said, struggling, “let go, let go, _give him to me_ ,” and Robert flung her aside, and she stumbled. “—save me from the tenderness of women,” she heard him say: an invocation, of what god she did not know. Then, quieter, there came the sounds of him murmuring nonsense to Joffrey. As if they hovered in the aftermath of someone else's rage.

In earlier years of their marriage, Cersei sometimes saw his hand twitch when she mocked him, and she had waited a long time for him to strike. But he hadn't, truly, then or now. He was only moving past her, though she could see the marks his grip had left.

Even prostrate, she thought, she was a Lannister. She didn't stand, but glared up at her lord; and he returned her scrutiny in kind. He looked unassailable as the Eyrie where he had fostered, although his brow was furrowed, his ears bright red. To be weaker than him, an oaf with another man's son on his shoulder, and to stir nothing in him but shame: it was not an indignity she'd bargained on enduring. Neither was the sight of her son, turning his face against the king's neck to show her his featureless cheek.

 

Her husband and her brother rode to war. In their absence, summer overran the capital like a liberating army, and Varys supplied her with her chief entertainment, which was penetration into the trivial maneuvering of courtiers. Her son's third name day came and went in a foam of expensive felicity, and the evening after a raven arrived with the seal of House Stark on its dispatch. Varys brought the letter to her solar at dusk, having taken up poor Pycelle's duties while he slept off his patriotism.

“Dark wings, dark words,” she said, looking out at the low stars.

“Let us hope not, Your Grace,” said Varys. She gestured for him to sit, and unrolled the scrap of parchment.

It was from Eddard Stark. It said, briefly, that the king had received a minor wound to the shoulder at the invasion of Pyke, which prevented him from writing himself, but that he was hale in all else, and that he bid her and his court come to Lannisport: where a tourney would be held to mark their victory. Ser Jaime had sustained no injuries in the defense of his king.

“You are weeping,” said Varys, and Cersei found that it was true. That salt wetted her mouth and clogged her throat. She dismissed its import, a little wistfully. She was not a madwoman, to tear her hair at nothing, to lament a dust-mote, to grieve for beings not seen or touched but surmised from the passage of the air. It had been a fantasy to think her husband or her brother would not return. “Is Robert—?”

“No,” she said, looking away. “My lord, they are tears of relief.”


	2. MOTHER & FATHER

The Hand of the King had a son, and he had named him Robert.

Cersei, drunk, laughed herself sick when she heard. “Have you _seen_ it?” she asked, while Robert unlaced his breeches with erratic obstinance. He was shirtless already, his back to the fire. “Seen a baby, I mean, not just swaddling clothes? I wouldn't put it past Lysa Arryn to traipse about with a corpse under her arm, if it was that or admit she had another stillborn boy. Though I suppose the smell would give her away. It's been, what, a week?”

Robert didn't crack a smile. “You are speaking of my namesake.”

“A jape, my love.” Cersei poured for them both. “Truly, I wish him joy of his heir.”

Her husband took his goblet wordlessly, and emptied it again in one draught. “Jon's like a father to me,” he said, as he had in a hundred prior conversations: usually before denying her something. “But Lady Arryn…”

“Is soft in the head,” Cersei said. “As well as the stomach. Why didn't he put her aside?”

“Thought the fault was his,” said Robert, reaching for the flagon. He was defter in his cups than she, having the greater experience, and besides a kind of muscular gravity that suppressed any debilitating tremor. Though not so muscular of late than it had been. She watched the corded column of the wine where it poured out, yellow as sinew. He righted the flagon and helped himself to a more moderate sip from the cup. “He's not as young as he was. But he's strong, he's always been strong, and she—” Firelight plated his shoulders and the small of his back; when he shrugged she had the impression of a coat of shifting mail. “Do you think it's true,” he said haltingly, “what they say. About disloyalty blighting a woman's womb.”

With a start, Cersei realized that he spoke not in prelude to an accusation, but in absolute frankness, like a man asking guidance from a priest. She wasn't sure whether to be offended or amused. It was one thing to have every assurance that he remained ignorant of her falseness, but he spoke as though forgetting that he asked it of a woman. A thought she would have welcomed, from a king she hadn't fucked.

“I don't put stock in it,” Robert said, spurred by her silence. “Myself. I've known damn maternal sluts. But Lysa…”

“You think she's given your lord Hand horns?” Lysa Arryn retained a certain sallow appeal in the wake of her difficult path to motherhood, but it had never occurred to Cersei that she had the mettle for an affair; though had they been discussing any other noblewoman in the capital, she wouldn't have questioned it for an instant. Betrayal was the currency of summer, and the first child of peace.

“I don't know.” He set the flagon down. “I did see the babe. Sickly thing. Blue-white, like bad cheese. Tommen and Myrcella and Joff didn’t look…” He gave a questioning glance; perhaps he was remembering that he'd been prompter to visit his foster father's son than he had been to call on his own children, and thought he might have missed the milky moment. “No,” Cersei told him. “They were screamers, every one, red as this keep.” Which was all the proof one needed that old wives’ tales were wind. “Blue means something is wrong with the breath.” She stopped herself. Was she a midwife, to instruct her king in infant ailments? She did not like, had never liked, that his attention could still occasion volubility in her. Something within wanted to tell him all, as though it mattered if he listened; as though it mattered if he died, _when_ he died, oblivious or with venom in his ears. In any case it would be long yet before her brother killed him. He was too young, too quick, too obviously well, and the lions could sleep decades in his shade.

“The breath,” Robert mused. And then: “The air is very thin in the Vale. Up high.”

“If you really think he's a cuckoo in the eagle's nest, perhaps it's just as well.”

“No,” said Robert. “Not that. I only meant, they've had such trouble… but he has the Arryn look.” He seemed to be convincing himself. “The brown hair, and those eyes.” Cersei, who had met Jon Arryn only after his head had silvered, declined to comment. She was calculating how much wine Robert had downed, atop how much ale, and wondering whether she should go to her knees, to pre-empt his traditional plea for two minutes between her legs. But a careless languor had settled on her, in the stifling heat of the room. She lay back on her elbows, letting her legs sprawl open, only to snap them shut when he approached; and she held out her hand instead, with oil on the palm. “Witch,” said her husband, amiably enough. She suspected the drink had taken its toll on his appetites. He was slow to firm in her slick fist. She reclined on the foot of the bed, and he leaned over her, one hand on the mattress behind them, one knee bending the coverlet beside her hip, so that her face stood level with his throat. He wore more perfume, these days—she could bear the muted, self-conscious smell of his skin beneath it, because it made her smile to think of him anointing himself like a maid.

“More,” said Robert, so she sped up her stroke. He was squeezing her breasts. She pushed the ball of her thumb into the base of his cock, and he let out a thin bald beggar's whine. His sagging belly against her wrist, his breast cushioned by fat and hair—they were less damning than that drawn-out noise, and she accepted it as tribute, as she would have an open vein.

Then something changed. He collapsed forward, onto her, her hand trapped under his hips; she had a clear vision of herself in a cave, with his severed cock for a torch. Almost, she laughed. “Others take you,” he gasped, hardness hot on her gut. He began to rock against her, with her face buried in his chest, till she thought she might pass out. Her mouth was too close to his armpit for perfume to make amends. The head of his cock slid across the top of her belly, jabbing above her navel, and she wanted—not to vomit, it was higher up in her—wanted to force her lungs out through her throat and escape piece by piece from feeling skin.

But after a moment he set his elbow by her ear and dragged himself up, a little: enough for breath. Her ribs ached. It was the first time he had come to her bed in a fortnight, and the fury that filled her was in some parts self-directed. He came to her, at most, once every fortnight. Impossible that it should so exhaust her: the mundane, loathsome problem of his lusts, and the cost of preserving her young womb for her own wants. Her extended self, the longed-for perfection, gold hair and grain-green eyes. And yet when he at last recalled his rights and dragged apart her legs, she lay there limply. She jerked her head aside, when he thumbed her cheekbone like a page in a history, and that was all.

It wasn't resignation. She would never bear his child, and she had a young woman's faith that her defiance would return to her. Her hatred had always been the better husband. But the fears that plagued her waking hours had receded like the skyline of a city: lights seen from the deck of a black ship, and the vessel sailing out, away, toward the intact, lovely darkness that comprised the open sea. In such a place, in this same mood—she might have leapt, had she perceived the edge. In all the starless world, one bright seam.

 

The moon turned.

“Jaime,” she said. He was dancing with Princess Myrcella, half-doubled over to accommodate her height. Cersei had never thought that her twin might be as susceptible to novelty as other men, but he showered his daughter with all the attentions he didn't pay Joffrey, stopping by the nursery the day he returned from his sojourn to Casterly Rock. Then again, Myrcella was not yet old enough to call him uncle.

“What do you think your mother wants, princess?” he said to the girl, not raising his head. She favored him strongly, of course, but Cersei didn't believe that a stranger come into the room would have taken him for her father or her uncle. Perhaps a brother, much older, visiting a home no longer his. A brother, perhaps, was all he yet knew how to be.

“Her mother wants to speak to you away from little ears,” she announced, while Myrcella stared up adoringly. It was true that he looked well in his dark crimson doublet, the wide collar ringed with rubies that winked in and out of sight; a gift from their father, to honor his homecoming, though Jaime had journeyed west for the Imp's name day and not his own. “Tommen can partner her.” They both glanced at Tommen, absorbed in the mysteries of a carved wooden warhorse, which he was chewing on. Jaime was visibly reluctant to go, and she wondered that he couldn’t hear the tension in her voice.

She took him to the godswood, where early afternoon painted the trees a crumbling gold, and they sat together near the bole of the presiding oak. “He has gotten a child on me,” she said, keeping her voice down, like it was treason. There were bees in the turf and flowers; Jaime was looking at the soil between his boots. She had almost hoped he would be angry, but this refusal to attend— “I bled after you left,” she said, needing him to believe her. “But I have not bled since.”

“I was only gone—”

“Too long,” she said, ripping a hank of grass out of the earth. Jaime said nothing. “I can feel it in me,” she said. “In my dreams, it looks…” Like Tyrion, she nearly said, with one blue eye and one green; but Jaime was ever fond of their abominable brother. “Like Robert.”

“What would you have me do?” said Jaime. “Will I fuck it out of you?” He sounded tired. What right did he have to speak tiredly, when he could come and go and sleep alone at nights when he wanted? But he was listening to her, and his first question, she thought, had been sincere. She wiped her hand on her skirt and wove her fingers through his.

“Find me a midwife,” she said. “One of the good ones. They know how the thing is done.”

 

He brought her to a woman who was nearing middle age, and who seemed prosperous for a peasant, though she dressed terribly. Above the broadcloth she had light brown hair and a surprising beauty, like one of the little birds that roosted in the eaves of the capital—not striking, but compact and well-made. If Robert had met her, he would have tried to seduce her; or perhaps had done already. She lived next to a brothel. She might even, Cersei reflected, have delivered one of his bastards, and that thought afforded her a morbid satisfaction, nearly sexual in its heat.

The operation was short and not painless. It was strange to feel her insides tear in a sunlit room, with a floor of packed dirt and a curtain for a door. When she had last given birth it had been under shuttered windows, with an acrid-burning fire in the hearth—to purify the space, Pycelle had said. It made sense, she had to admit, that purity in this case was uncalled-for. By the time the thing was done, blood dyed the straw pallet like madder. There was no corpse, although she had half-seriously imagined there might be a small one, the size of an eye. Except as she tossed her head and gritted her teeth through the last pangs of expulsion, her veil slipped away; and the midwife said, “Oh,” in pain or worship, and Jaime took his sword out of its sheath.

Cersei let him do it. Afterwards, though dizzy from the loss, she helped him arrange the body on the cot, and admired again the unscarred line of the profile, the crimped mass of soft hair. It would look as though the blood had issued from a wound and not a womb. Jaime cleaned his sword on the woman's skirt, and took her arm, and said, “Some avenging husband, no doubt. Or a mad priest? The gods frown on these witches, I have heard.”

 

The night after, at a feast held to honor some hedge knight or other, Cersei did not—as had been her wont for the past week—take supper in her room. The smell of food no longer made her dizzy. She sat triumphant at Robert's side, her stomach flat, a green silk girdle cinched low at her hips. “To my loving wife,” said Robert, late in the evening, and the hall toasted her, the clinking of a hundred cups like swordplay to her ears.

Lysa and Jon Arryn had joined them on the dais. Lysa was resplendent in white cotton; a necklace of blue chalcedony hung long about her throat. She spoke exclusively of her baby, and mentioned twice how much she regretted having to leave him for evening—though with high spots of color on her cheeks, and lips glossed by enthusiastic spittle, she was not the very image of remorse. She admitted she had had some trouble making milk. Cersei, examining the crossed wrists and bony neck, was unsurprised. “You must eat more,” she said, patting the other woman on the hand. Lysa balked, so Cersei squeezed her arm.

Robert, of all people, noticed the exchange. He laughed at Lysa's dismay, not unkindly, his crinkling eyes wistful. Said, “Now's a good time to start.” The servers had brought out the next course, but the queen hardly observed the loaded plate in front of her; she was staring at her husband. He noticed that, too, and stopped smiling, and ten minutes after put his hand on a serving girl's teats when she leaned over him to refill his goblet. After that they did not converse.

Jon Arryn, at the opposite end of the table, said a few dry words about how good it was to see Her Grace up and about. Lysa giggled. Her husband gave a reproving shake of his head and regarded Cersei steadily, his gaze—compassionate, Cersei supposed, but more than that empty; she thought of the midwife's corpse unfolded on its pallet.

He departed soon after, claiming an old man's infirmity. His wife did not.

“You remind me of my sister,” she said to Cersei, picking at her meal with a fork.

Cersei had never met Catelyn Stark. She thought it unlikely that Lysa made the comparison to flatter her. Lysa was looking at her with shadowed eyes and a mouth that worked silently, gruesomely, cheeks hollowing and slackening as though she strove to chew overcooked meat—perhaps her heart. Cersei was just about to ask her how they were like when she spoke again.

“ _Wasteful_ ,” she said. And turned back to her plate.

The feast didn't conclude until an hour nearer dawn than midnight. Robert was almost insensible, though he sobered a little when Jaime helped him to his chamber, and said, “Bloody hell, I thought you were my wife.”

“Think of me as her strong right arm, Your Grace. She would have carried you here alone if she could have.”

His wife, overseeing the procedure from his left side, favored them both with a tight smile, and summoned Robert’s attendants to bundle him into bed. Two of them were distant cousins of her family; the third belonged to a line that had been sworn to House Lannister when Lannisters were kings. They applied themselves to Robert’s muffled complaints, but filed out at the signal of their queen.

Jaime lingered, one hand on her wrist. There was murder shining in his face: a light as steady as a maester’s lamp, and almost it could have been mistaken for affection, but for the pressure of his thumb on her palm. Then he looked away. It was always startling, how swiftly he withdrew.

“Are you going, Kingslayer?” said the king. “Take your sister with you.” He laughed, shortly. “I’ll be of no use to her tonight. Though, with Cersei—”

Jaime walked out.

“Doesn’t want to hear about his sister’s cunt, eh? Well, and who would?” Robert was unravelling, she thought, and this time there would be no recovery until the sun was high. “He’s not to know that it’s as safe as it was when the two of you were sharing a teat.” This reflectively, and without rancor; he really was far gone. “You should go after him. Give him a little advice on parrying swords.” And at her silence: “Ah, Cersei, the sun is rising. Won’t you leave me be?”

“You slept with Jon Arryn's wife,” she said. She walked to stand by the foot of his bed, her carriage irreproachable, gathering her beauty like a whip. “Thus your insufferable handwringing over the curse on her womb. I should have guessed.”

“No,” Robert said. He seemed smaller from on high. She enjoyed how he huddled beneath the sheets. Despite his claim that the morning was upon them, there was no illumination but the cooling hearth, and his shadow reached to scrape the wall. “I wanted—I kissed her,” he said, defeat in his voice; too heavily, joylessly drunken to bluster. “One night in the gardens. I was drunk. Very drunk. Don’t think—I never would have—I love Jon. It was only a kiss. A brotherly kiss, in truth, I swear to you. But Lysa…”

“Had teats and a cunt?”

“She was _lonely_ ,” he said. “Or I thought so. Yet when I—when I—”

“Put your hand under her skirt and thanked the gods her name began with L—”

“She misunderstood my intentions. Said, she belonged to another. And she sounded like a woman in love.”

An incredulous snort escaped her. “Not her husband?”

“I didn't think it could be.”

“But she gave him a son,” Cersei said, touching her stomach through her gown. “With the Arryn look, no less.”

“Yes."

At that she gave up looming. She crossed the room, to hunch before the embers: which glowed like precious things, though they were frail. Each coal an eye. With a poker she nudged them until the flames leapt up, yellow and fluted, clear and without any shape to hold.

 

* * *

 

This was what she would remember, when six years had intervened, and her father likened her son to her husband in the selfsame council room:

Two of Joffrey's milk teeth on the floor. The echo of the blow still ringing off the walls. Herself, rising. She had screamed, but the scream had faded faster than the sound.

“Get it out of my sight,” said Robert.

_It._ What Cersei wouldn't remember, when her father blamed her for it, was exactly what had happened to the cat. And the cat’s, the cat's… the kittens. Joffrey had dropped the body when his father struck him, and the kittens had spilled from its womb. Now they coiled in a puddle by its teats, a parody of a suckling litter, grayish-pink, polished and slim. Little things, to cause so much complaint.

Cersei, who had touched lions, thought it was the fault of anyone but the boy. The cook's fault, for telling him such things, as if a prince should care for pregnant cats. Robert's, for not providing him with more impressive prey. No one would have balked if he had opened a lioness. Her poor fierce prince.

“At once, Your Grace,” said Petyr Baelish, to Robert's command. He folded the kittens into his handkerchief, squeamish as a girl.

They were all fools. Men thought that courage could lie fallow in times of peace, could be watered with chivalry in lieu of richer blood. Cersei knew better. When the strong made accord with the strong, then where was there for strength to spend itself, except against powerless things? Why else did men hunt, whore, marry—why else, the blood-tinged teeth on the stone floor. His baby teeth. Minute and irregular as pearls, they showed yellowish under the flickering sconces, which had only just been lit.

“Your Grace,” she heard Varys begin, in his most soothing simper: but even he seemed at a loss, and soon trailed to nothing. Useless as ever. She wondered which of them he had intended to placate. She was already upright. She went to her son, sobbing where he had fallen. Who was on all fours. At any other time he would have flailed in his rage, but here there was just his stillness, its own accusation. His mouth bled and she dried it on her skirt.

“My darling,” she said, her hand in his ringlets. “My only, he will never hurt you again.” They might have been the last two people in the world.

“Out,” said Robert. The small council fled. Only Stannis Baratheon, black-clad and dour, paused at the door with eyes like the core of a candle's flame, frowning at the tableau he'd abandoned. He left soon after.

“The boy too,” Robert said. “If he can walk.”

She would have called him anything, then, but Joffrey put his face to her arm and said, “Please, mother," and whispered that he hurt. She set him on his feet, closing her hand over his. But he straightened. Faced Robert. “It was the cook's fault,” he said, echoing her thoughts with clumsy ingenuity. “She said there were kittens. I just wanted to see. And I thought—I thought—” He wrenched loose his fingers and ran out.

Robert remained standing at the long table, his knuckles propped on the unfinished edict he had been summoned to sign. She should have followed her son at once, but she stopped in the middle of the room, with her back still turned to the king.

“Don't,” said Robert. “My god, woman, he _gutted_ her.”

“It,” she said. “He gutted it.”

Robert was silent for some time. “I liked that cat,” he said.

Cersei smiled, despite it all. “Is that why you struck your son? Because you held a cat more dear than you do your true heir?”

“He needs more than a box to the ears.”

“If you touch him,” she said, “I will kill you in your sleep.” And without turning she raised aloft the dagger she'd retrieved from her son.

Robert stared at her. “Go and see to your brats,” he said, sitting down.

She walked swiftly to the door, pivoted, and saw him rest his head on his fists. Impulsively she flung the red dagger to his feet. It hit the flagstones and skidded wide, but Robert flinched from it, and touched his cheek as if to check the nature of the wound. His cowardice consoled her, as his courage never could. There _was_ blood—not on his cheek—but glittering, ringlike, on the upraised hand.

 

She wrote to her father at Casterly Rock. Jaime is not enough, she said in the letter. Jaime cannot be between them always, Jaime is too much away from me and mine. And, as an addendum—the bruise is half his face.

Her father made no reply, but a fortnight later Sandor Clegane rode through the gates of King's Landing.

Cersei had him appointed as Joff's sworn shield. Robert asked, “Who'll protect Clegane?” and went out hunting. But Joffrey took to him immediately. Her younger children were too small to hide their distress at the ruin he called face, but her firstborn loved the burn, and would have touched it often had Cersei not intervened. Clegane didn't shy away from any of the prince's demands, which she approved of in principle, but when it came to letting her son's unblemished hands near the wet craters, the open cheek… She advised him that if her son asked again in private, he should demur. She was not sure if he listened. He was missing an ear on the side of the scar.

Jaime found it hilarious, once he overcame his disappointment that this was not, at last, enough for her to let him quarter Robert. “Joff kills a cat, so you give him a dog,” he said, leaning against the low wall of the training yard to watch Joffrey shoot. Clegane lurked at the boy’s elbow, offering no criticism; the master-of-arms, Ser Aron Santagar, seemed subdued in his presence, and only delivered favorable verdicts. “At least this one won't get pregnant.”

“It was an evil looking thing,” Cersei said, trying to recall. “Dark. And mangy.”

“So's your cur.”

“I don't need him to be beautiful.”

“You have me for that.” He essayed armored daintiness, cocking his hip, and when she rolled her eyes fluidly made the pose a bow. Took her hand and kissed it. The warmth of noon was on them, and the thunk of arrows in the target matched the staccato presence of her heart—now audible, now discreet, but in all things violent. She was reminded of the first summer of their childhood, when he would wear her dresses, and she his tights; their father had mistaken her for Jaime, and chided her for throwing stones at pig herds in the hills. He had said, “You will be lord after me.” That reproach had thrilled her more than all the praises he saved for his daughter; and his daughter had treasured his praise.

But he'd been wrong. Both in truth and conception. They were neither of them going to come into Tywin's titles. Jaime had worn his white armor today, and she wore woven silk, and side by side, each reduced by the other's resemblance, they looked less than a knight and a queen. Twins first: with so much else lagging behind.

“What is it you do need him for?” Jaime asked. “He's not improving the boy's archery.”

“You know what,” Cersei said. The bruise was gone as if it’d never been, but Joffrey was still anxious around his father. For her benefit, Robert claimed, but she had seen the boy blench at his raised hand. “Ser Aron can teach him how to use a bow. Until then, the Hound will kill birds for him, and… whatever it is one needs archery for.” Felling stags.

“ _I_ could teach him to use a bow,” Jaime said. “I admit, I'm not much of a marksman, but I at least—”

“You can't,” Cersei said. And then, trying to soften the words— “He is more like you every day.”

Jaime raised his eyebrows. “I don't recall sticking a dagger in any kitchen tabbies. If I had, I certainly wouldn't have brought them to our father for inspection afterwards.”

“No. You were content to stick your dagger where no one would think to look.”

He laughed. “Swordplay, is it? Well, if I can't instruct the son—”

It was her turn to clutch his hand. “Look at him,” she said, low enough that it might have been lost in birdsong and the twang of the bow, and the remote noise of the city. Joffrey set his feet, aimed; sent an arrow arcing past the top part of the target. Jaime exhaled, not quite in laughter, and Joff's head whipped round, trailing gold. She hadn't realized that he could hear them so clearly. Perhaps he couldn't. His glance was an unripe thing. “The target's too close,” she heard him say. “It's too easy. That shot would have landed if the target hadn't been so _close._ ”

“My prince, if you would aim a little lower…”

“Move it back,” he commanded. “I'm tired of playing. I can throw arrows further than this.”

Before Santagar could tailor his answer to this new argument, the Hound pushed him aside, and picked the target up with one hand. “Where do you want it?” he said, to Joffrey.

Joffrey looked caught. “Five more yards,” he said, and Clegane complied, with an exactness that bordered on ridicule. Joffrey fired his last arrow while the man was still making adjustments.

It lodged itself deep in the outer ring's upper edge, loudly. Sandor Clegane stepped out from behind the target with deliberate grace. The arrowhead would have hit him in the ribs but for the canvas obstacle. He wore chain mail, and it was a little bow; he would have been bruised at the worst. Still. He was smiling. That uneven, unfinished grin, with molars glittering like tarnished coin in the pocket of his cheek—and he reached out very idly and ripped the arrow from its hole.

“Bring it here,” Joffrey said, pointing to his quiver.

“Now they're playing fetch,” muttered Jaime. He had resumed his attitude of distant interest, elbows rested on the wall like the low boughs of the wisteria, which cascaded over the enclosure's far corner. “You really think he looks like me?”

“Of course,” Cersei said, but she didn't; he looked like her, at that age, dressed in Jaime's clothes and fooling everyone. Jaime had never been so vengeful or so clean.

Joffrey said a sharp word to Ser Aron, and dropped his bow. He and the Hound tromped off, Joffrey stopping long enough for a kiss on the crown from his mother. He wriggled out again before she could interrogate him about his breakfast, claiming lessons. “You have my royal permission to _kill_ the maester if he's boring,” she heard him tell Clegane, before they vanished into the shaded depths of the keep. Ser Aron shrugged and went the other way: presumably to find and educate less volatile pages.

She said, “You didn't want anything to do with him till he picked up a weapon.”

“I wouldn't have known what to do with him before he picked up a weapon,” Jaime said, turning, gliding his hand along the sheer top of the wall. “It was just a thought. He should have someone who won't run at his beck and call. Do you _know_ anything about the Cleganes? The way Uncle Gerion told it, this one's older brother killed their father, and this one wants to kill him.”

“I thought your objection was that he was too biddable,” said Cersei dreamily.

“The Mountain killed Elia and her son—”

“On Father's command.”

“Father didn't tell him to rape her to death.”

“Then the Hound is to be commended for seeking justice for the princess,” Cersei said. “And his father. And in the meantime, he could ask for no worthier pursuit—”

“Than doing tricks for a babe?”

“Joff's seven,” she said, “and his father wants to beat him. That makes him almost a man, wouldn't you say?”

Jaime's mouth twisted. “I'd say it makes him unfortunate in his choice of fathers.”

“Not everyone can be as lucky as us,” Cersei said, kissing his cheekbone, and then, lower, the end of his mouth. They were face to face, and it was tempting to slide her hand up his armored flank, and undo the ties of his mail; but anyone might come into the yard. She undid the clasp of his cloak, instead, drawing it from him like a flag of surrender. He smiled at her, and she thought it was a pity, how unsuitable he was and how proud. He would never understand that what she wanted for her son was absolute dominion. The unbearable part of the ordeal had not been Robert striking Joff. What she could not endure was that Joffrey had come to show him the kittens at all.

“Patience, brother,” she said, to the sleekness of his jaw. “He'll learn how to fight men in due time. Who did you have to teach you?—and yet you have no peer.”

 

Robert brought back a hart of twelve, the brown fur spotted at the back and rump. Its antlers and wide onyx eyes endeared her to it, and she suggested that he mount the head above their bed. He gave it to his brother. To ornament the halls of Dragonstone, he said. Cersei amused herself by imagining what Stannis might think of his brother presenting him with horns; after the business with Edric Storm, the idea had surely populated his nightmares, and not out of any characteristic aversion to venison. She wondered whether he knew that Varys sent presents to the boy in Robert's name. Probably. It was among Robert's favorite after-dinner japes. The man with no seed, tending to his runoff.

“He's not a knight,” he said, of Clegane, having been moved by the latter's permanence to consider him in more extravagant detail. “Why? A strapping young fellow like him?”

“Is he young?” Cersei said. “I hadn't noticed.”

“He is damned ugly, isn't he?” said Robert, chuckling. His chins wobbled.

“He is,” said Cersei, and didn't add: he has the better excuse. Lately Robert had nursed the wiry beginnings of facial hair, to hide his growing corpulence. She would have protested in their mutual youth—god knew it made it harder to pretend that he was Jaime—but the mass of his gut had crushed the possibility, and so she let him cultivate his thicket: only once offering to shave it, for the pleasure of his response. “How long has it been,” he'd said, “since you promised to cut my throat while I slept?”

“I didn't specify your throat,” Cersei replied.

Now she watched him watch the Hound, his focus only heightened by a helplessness he must have recognized, even in himself. “You could knight him,” she said.

“For what deed?”

“For making your son laugh,” Cersei suggested. Joffrey was laughing, certainly. Who had caused it—well, the Hound was trying on a gift Joff had commissioned for him, a helm worked in the shape of a scent hound’s snarling maw. From under its lip he looked stoically out at the garden, where the royal family took their leisure on days too hot to spend indoors. He was not humoring the boy so much as weathering him; Cersei had seen him tense a hundred times at Joffrey's experiments, but he coiled, when he did, for flight and not for rebuttal. She knew the difference. Wary men saw everything, as vexed men couldn't. Her husband, when he succumbed to violence, was like an animal that had lived out its days at the bottom of the sea, and struggled mechanically against the least faint light. But the Hound's eyes were vigilant. She imagined that if he turned his gaze far enough left he would see his own scar.

“Should I knight Moon Boy, then, and have done?” The king's voice was deceptively mellow.

“I am sure he would do you leal service.”

The look he gave her, dark under dark brows, would have cowed a lesser woman; had cowed his brothers, in its time, and all his lords. It was savage not in any guise of intelligence but in its senseless power. To live under Robert's reign, Cersei sometimes felt, was to know a fraction of how Rhaegar must have suffered when he died. The hammer's landing echoed by the silence of his heart. Rubies flying clear and sparklike off the plate. His beauty wholly broken in a brutal, stupid triumph, which did not end, but multiplied, like grass overrunning a ruin. All of what came after had been written at that ford.

But Robert now was a fat man perspiring in silk, and he as well could tire of her regard. She held her chin up high, her shoulders straight, her glory condemnation. He rubbed, between two fleshy hands, her unresponsive palm.

“Now you really are my dog,” said Joff with easy malice. He tugged on the strap of the helmet until Clegane bent down to hear him. “You'll wear it forever.”

“To my grave,” said the Hound.


	3. THE CRONE, THE SMITH

She dreamed an old dream, with variations.

The tent had gone up near Lannisport's eastern gates, half a mile from the tourney field proper; wayfarers had trampled the grass almost to nothing around its pegs, and vendors hawked trinkets and sweets even after the sun had set—though the nature of the sweets was diverse, and vendor and ware were sometimes one when stars stitched the darkening sky. It was true of a fortune teller as much as of a whore.

As always, they found her sleeping. But the dream shifted, and Maggy was young, or at least not unimaginably a consequence of youth. She had her hands clasped lightly on her chest, the sharp fingers like talons, but her hair was still dust-brown as much as gray, trailing long around her spherical head, and her eyes… no, nothing had changed in her eyes. They opened yellow in the gloom, like flowers in a marsh, and as black at the center as a poppy's silken heart. And that horrible sheen, the greenish residue that sent Jeyne Farman screaming from the tent. She _was_ old, Cersei assured herself; naked and old, and when she sat up a compass could have described the slope of her back—from tailbone to scalp, it was one curve.

“Begone,” she said.

“We came for a foretelling,” said the girl at Cersei's side, whose loose hair was closer to brass than gold in the light of the brazier. Then and only then did Cersei realize that she had not been given her usual place. Tonight, she stood where Melara had stood, with no lion's-head brooch pinned to her throat. She was still queen. But she had a dreamer's surety there were freckles on her cheeks.

“Begone,” said Maggy, snuffling, like a boar among the roots.

“We heard that you can see into the morrow,” she said, not wanting to; the words escaped her mouth. “We just want to know what men we're going to marry.”

“Begone,” said the witch. She was looking at the girl Cersei had been, though, and thirst illuminated the bones beneath the thick and folded skin. Melara could see, as Cersei had not, how her tongue moved behind the droop of her cheek, like a worm navigating a skull.

“…have you whipped for insolence,” Cersei was saying, and Maggy put on a robe that didn't hide the flat length of her breasts. “Come,” she said, “if you will not go.” She offered them a dagger.

How quick it had been to get the blood, in the end: how easily the lioness gave of herself. And of her companions—Melara had seemed more surprised than pained when Cersei pricked her thumb, all those years ago, but in the dream the dagger bit deeply, and the globule of blood that welled after was onyx on her skin. It tracked a ring around the knuckle when she turned her hand up. As if she had wed a man too cheap for bonds of gold—but willing, still, to paint his claim in red.

“Give it here,” Maggy told them.

Cersei held out her hand like a lady awaiting a knight's kiss. Maggy, as formally, took her thumb into her mouth. Her throat moved. Tightened. Melara watched Cersei's face twist, and searched for any likeness to the trapped and dreaming queen.

The green eyes were the same, naturally. The curls in their glinting disarray. Elsewise, puppy fat hid Cersei's prospects as well as warts did Maggy's bygone charms. She was clothed in the ivory samite, the confection she had worn when produced for the prince; there were grass stains glistening at the hem. You must be especially beautiful, Genna Lannister had said before the ceremony, fussing with her bodice. Hard to imagine what her aunt had thought would come of such instruction. At ten, Cersei was as similar to Jaime as she'd ever wanted—a boy in all but name, sparely built for her five feet, with undistinguished prettiness her face’s apogee.

The queen remembered it, being the girl. She had been sure that she was owed, though not of what. She'd been fiercely impatient of her debtors. In the time it took Maggy to lick the blood away she had thought a hundred thoughts, most of them to do with burning the tent when they were finished. She had expected the wide world to bend its back to her.

Yet in all that, Melara saw only a child, with a child's look of vacuous distaste.

The dream. That was the dream. Melara had been just two years older than Cersei, and hungry for her approval, and what did it matter if the queen would never, passing her younger self on the street, have attributed to her the capacity for intellect or foresight? Children were beasts, all save her own—she recalled Tyrion in his cradle, his mute burrowing glance. Still it filled her with horror to view her plainness from without. To find it so impermeable, the mind not only closed to her but seemingly quite absent: as it was in the faces of her husband and his lords. Her servants, the smallfolk, the horses she rode. Every flat eye she’d turned from, in contempt. It was as though she'd built her home on what she thought was a rocky hill; only to remember, after a life of hauntings, that someone had been buried there, beneath the heaped-high earth.

The rest of the prophecy she endured in silence. “Will I marry Jaime?” she said, when at last it was her turn. Cersei had hated Melara for asking it, but now… Say yes, thought the queen, with stupid hope.This time, you must say yes.

But it was as it had always been.

“Your death is here tonight, little one,” said Maggy the Frog. “Can you smell her breath? She is very close.”

She could. She was. Melara closed her eyes.

 

Then they were running. Out of the tent, out of the encampment, out of darkness into unwholesome day. A kind of dawn had come, yes, but it was faint and gray-green as the glow from the brazier. The sky might only have been a larger pavilion: the world roofed with canvas, warmed by coals. In life, they had gone home to their beds, had let their terror fester overnight; but in the dream they crossed rutted fields and roads, tore over grassy ridges and ruins not built by men.

They came to a well.

“Stop,” Cersei said. “We should stop. She was just a lying hag.”

No, thought the queen, no, no, she was a hag and she spoke true. Had she not tried six years for a fourth child? “You're right,” said Melara. She pulled her mantle close against the wind.

“Of course I'm right,” Cersei said, sounding discontented with the word. She was flushed and sweaty from their wild flight, her hair a cloud of gold around her head, her cloak tangled up in her skirts; she leaned over the wall of the well and began, unceremoniously, to haul up the bucket. It took no time at all. Her injured thumb reddened the chain like quick rust where it touched it. When she had the bucket, she drank eagerly, and water that had been black in its stillness closed glassy talons round the sides of her jaw. “Give it here,” Melara said, throat dry and mouth burning, but Cersei put the bucket back on the hook, and tipped out what remained.

“I'm not your servant,” she said. She was watching Melara with eyes like veins in marble: long and green. “Get it yourself.”

“Yes, Cersei,” said Melara meekly, while the queen in her seethed. She turned the crank to unwind the chain, keeping her eyes on the ash grove behind the well.

“Sixteen children,” Cersei said, to herself. “And three for me.”

“Don't speak of it,” Melara said. “If we don't speak of it, then it'll be just like a bad dream, and we can forget. Bad dreams never come true.”

This one did, thought the queen. But Cersei looked half-convinced. “You'd like that, wouldn't you,” she murmured. “If it was a dream, you could still marry Jaime.”

“I don't want to _die_ ,” Melara said.

“She said that worms would have your maidenhead,” Cersei observed. “We could ask one of Father's knights to deflower you, and then—”

Melara whirled on the younger girl, who did not even skip back, but laughing stood her ground. “Don't worry,” she said. “I'd make sure he married you after.”

“I don't want to marry anyone but Jaime,” Melara said, with a savage tug at the crank. The chain was fully extended. There was Cersei's handprint on it still, dark and shining, hemmed around by beads of dew. Melara tried to wipe it off, but only succeeded in enlarging it, until it might have been the record of a cat’s enormous paw. “He'll love me, I know he will. And you can't keep him to yourself forever.”

“What did you say?” said Cersei, turning her head.

It was almost funny. There had been a time, years earlier, when that imperious child had prized Melara's chatter. Casterly Rock, in Cersei's girlhood, had been a world of fixed poles: her brother's love, her father's pride, her mother's watchfulness—they drew an axis through her, like a sword. She had never needed to learn them. But Melara was sent to attend on her when she was eight, in a transparent attempt of Lady Joanna's to compensate for Jaime's removal to the easternmost wing of the Rock, and she was quick and bold and pretty, and a stranger.

Cersei allowed herself to be compensated; had found acquisition more diverting than inheritance, for several months, almost a year. Her mother always said that a friend was like a sibling of the soul. Cersei, once she was old enough to finish the comparison, remembered her fondness for Melara in different terms, as a pale shadow of something that was a long way off from family. It was what she supposed the singers meant, when they sang of _falling in love—_ condescending, that was, to lower oneself into love; to take refuge in that unworthy but interesting bed, a foreign mind. The exact inverse of what she felt for Jaime, who grew with her, who had emerged into the world with her, clinging her foot. She had pulled him out then and would go on pulling him up.

It couldn't last, of course. Her mother died, Tyrion lived, and Cersei lost most of her taste for new experiences. And Melara, her elder and inferior, with little breasts like darts beneath the fabric of her bodice, developed a taste for her twin. A two-fold betrayal, by Cersei's accounting: first because she'd lusted after what belonged to Cersei, and second because she'd lusted after belonging to Cersei. Cersei valued her, or had, and if her affection faded, well, that was betrayal too. Melara had stopped making her happy. Melara declined to try. Nothing could truly console Cersei in the long year following her mother's death, but while her uncles vied for a smile and her brother kissed her furious eyes, Melara accepted defeat like she was a woman grown, and loss her lover. She left off striving to please her lady, and gave herself over to thoughts of lords, of marriage and handsome youths—had prepared, complacently, to abandon her friend.

Cersei did not tolerate desertion. She was her father's daughter, then and always. Robert called for Lyanna in his dreams, and she would end his line and end his life. Jaime might have married Lysa Tully, but she put a stop to it, though it meant he would never own the Rock. Her mother died; Cersei punished the monstrous thing that stole her. She would not be forsaken again. She would sow the ground with salt before winter seduced her harvest. But facing herself, in the intricate dawn, she thought that there was something she had forgotten, through all her safeguards. Some hypocrisy for which she might be sentenced with the rest. Who was it, where was it—what in a life of taking had she ever left behind?

“Just because you're twins,” said Melara. “You think he belongs to you. Even though you're going to marry the prince, and be a queen.”

“A king, Maggy said.” The other Cersei had a queer expression on her face, and the intermittent light did not alleviate it. Yellow lapped the rim of one green iris. You could see more, like this, of the beauty that would be, with all else uncertain. “But you don't want that to happen either. Isn't that right? You want us to act like she didn’t make the prophecy. So that it can't come true.”

“I thought you wanted to marry Prince Rhaegar,” Melara said.

“I want to marry Rhaegar,” Cersei corrected. “A prince isn't a prince forever. Not the ones worth having, anyway.” She had, without Melara's asking it, taken over the business of retrieving the bucket after all, and had raised it to hang level with the well's circling wall. The water was like molten gold, now that the shadows of the trees had parted to frame the well in gloom. What was the old story? The door into death, held barely ajar. The lamplight pouring through. “Get your drink,” said Cersei, who had stepped aside.

“If we never speak of it, we'll forget,” Melara said, plodding closer. “It can't hurt us if we forget.”

“I'm sure you're right,” Cersei said. She was older now, it seemed—to both her witnesses. Almost a woman grown, in bridal whites. The sun had crowned her. “No one must know. No one can be _told._ But as for hurting… I want to be queen.” And she raised her hand to touch Melara's shoulder.

 

Cersei woke with a jolt. It was dark in her chamber; the film of sweat on her felt as cold as well-water, as deathly. She suppressed an awful urge to check the looking glass for freckles.

“You were screaming,” Robert said.

In the dimness nothing could be grasped of him except for his massive silhouette, and the consciousness that he had turned away. He was studying the curtains around the bed, she thought, as though in search of a crack. It was the first time he had come to fuck her in half a year. Small wonder if she had had ill dreams.

“Go to sleep, my heart,” she said.

“You were _weeping_ ,” Robert said. His tone was not concerned but sullen. She had roused him, she supposed, from dreamless rest—and the gods knew that he did not rouse easily, when he had drunk his fill. His arm was on her. He had an air of morose expectation, as one waiting a murderer's protest of innocence.

 _Queen you shall be,_ Cersei recalled, _until there comes another._ The shove, the fall. The pale face of a dead young girl, staring up from its hole. “I was dreaming of you,” she said: to see him start.

“Damn you,” said Robert, and sat up, parting the curtains to let inside a broad stripe of blue moonlight. “Damn me,” he added, standing. He waddled to the windowsill, and poured himself a drink.

 

* * *

 

“A whorehouse."

“Jon Arryn and Stannis Baratheon seem unlikely bedfellows,” said Cersei, sipping a glass of iced wine. “And brothelmates. What did they do there?”

“Talked. There was a foreign woman, the madame, she wanted them to give her money, and Lord Stannis threatened to have her arrested. And then there was the one they were looking for, with the baby. They talked to her for a long time. The Hand did. Lord Stannis mostly glared.”

“Did you see the baby?”

“Yes, Your Grace. Not well. She was very protective. She wouldn't stop saying that she was waiting for _him—_ the father, I suppose.” Something in the careful tone of this last remark suggested that Senelle knew perfectly well of whom she spoke. The fruity Dornish vintage began to sour on Cersei's tongue.

“The mother, then. Tell me about the mother.”

Reluctance. “She was… very young, Your Grace. A redhead. Freckly. Tall…”

“And enormous teats. Yes, I know the type." The serving woman at Casterly Rock had been one such: broad-shouldered, with carroty twists of hair popping out from her white cloth cap, and the imperturbable calm of the witless. Probably her placidity had been a boon to the slaver that bought her, once the first shock of selfish grief was past. The darkness in the servants’ quarters, with oil lamps and torches only corrupting the view. No, she hadn't wailed over her dead twin boys, but she'd looked at Cersei with hatred, which was as astonishing, written on her sow's face. What had she done when Robert took off his breeches, Cersei wondered. Made a sound, or closed her eyes, or watched him in absolute incomprehension, civilly perplexed by his intent?

But she'd been attached to the children he got on her. Black-furred, pudgy packages, the red-brown of raw clay, they reproduced their mother's looks with the fidelity that Robert showed his marriage bed—what pull they had for the dam, once the cord was cut, she didn't know. Cersei's children were an enlargement of her hold on the world, they were traction on a steep slick wall, and when she held her hair up to Myrcella's no man could spot the purer gold. To look at Joffrey, who would be king, was to see sky in the mouth of her grave. The serving woman's sons… were usurpers. Thieves and stowaways, foreigners that had hidden in her womb and feasted on her. She should have kissed both Cersei's feet for ordering them killed.

Senelle was waiting. “For your trouble,” said Cersei, dropping a purse on the table.

“I also spoke to the apprentice,” Senelle said. “From the forge?”

“I asked you to watch the Hand, not to consort with these guttersnipes.”

“I couldn't hear what the Hand asked him while they were in the armorer’s shop, last week. But now I know everything Lord Arryn said to him, and more besides.”

“Gods be good,” said Cersei, in disgust. “You didn't bed him?”

Senelle smiled down at her lap. “He's too young for that. Though in a year or two—”

“Spare me your lechery. What is it you learned?”

“He never knew his father,” said the girl. “And the Hand was asking after his mother. What she looked like, what she did… what color was her hair…”

“His answers?”

“She worked in a tavern, Your Grace. She died when he was small.” Senelle glanced at the mirror on the table, and then the carpet. “She had yellow hair.”

Cersei, too, looked to the glass. It was darker in the reflected room than in the real. Jaime, she thought, smiling, and in that moment felt denial come.

Jon Arryn and Lord Stannis, joined in conspiracy. Scouting out the children who were so obviously Robert’s, in the brothels and the forges, every low corner of the land.

It couldn’t be true. Arryn didn’t know where his own wife slept when he wasn’t roosting atop her. Why would he be the one to guess aright? After fifteen years? They’d been caution itself. Only that was a threadbare fiction, barely a rag, to tie around this sudden nakedness. There was no keeping Jaime from her or her from Jaime. It might have pleased them to play at vigilance; it might inflame their ardor to know how they baited fate; but they’d have fucked on the steps of Baelor, had it been Baelor or drought. Caution, in the end, would have kept them chaste.

To hell with it. “Where did you leave him?” she asked. “Arryn.” Stannis wouldn’t go to Robert alone, not with an accusation that would have made him heir. But Jon Arryn… on the day that Aerys refused her father, she had known a kind of indignant despair, that she should have wanted so much and tried so little to secure it; and that she should have wasted her one chance, in the bloom of false surety. The same acute emotion, black and deep, rose in her now. Had he told him? It was morning, and her children lived. She would kill them both, she thought, Jaime would do it; they’d have no chance to realize their plotting, and if they did then she would be revenged. Jon Arryn had brokered her marriage. There was inconstancy!

“I left him at the brothel,” Senelle said, after a pause.

Surprised by the turn in my interest, Cersei thought, and could have cursed. She must act as if she still gave a damn about the bastards.

“This apprentice,” she said, tapping the lip of her glass. “His master is an armorer, yes? Tobho…”

“Tobho Mott, if it please Your Grace.”

“What does the boy look like?” she asked. She tried to flatten out the pitch of her speech, and then, changing her mind, spoke shrilly. The queen of the Seven Kingdoms, a jealous wife. “Is he strong?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps we’ve run short of likely lordlings, and the Hand has gone to comb the gutters for the next year’s crop of knights.”

“Perhaps, Your Grace,” said Senelle, looking tired or bored. Good. She was a plump, little, mousy girl, sixteen or close to it, as trustworthy as the daughters of hedge knights came; she wore her hair in unflattering braids and spoke of great men’s affairs with deft humility, reporting as though from a vantage point too low for complete understanding. Like a snake trying to piece together the life of legged things, in bootheels and skirt-hems, and snatches of strange sound. Cersei expected humility, but she did not credit it, least of all in the young. No doubt the real preoccupations of the mighty had come as a disappointment to Senelle. Philandering, inheritance squabbles, the constant marriage plots; vices that supplemented passion in men who had run out of room to climb. But room to fall, always: they forgot that. She had forgotten. How clearly she was thinking about the situation, now that panic had purged her head of all its former cares. Even if they had been replaced by irrelevancies, like Senelle’s opinion of her betters. Her mind groped for a handle, for a crack—anything to pull itself from the pit of its fear.

In the dangling now, she was calm. Clinging to what crevices she found. Poor Senelle. Such a dowdy child; but outmatched by the dowdiness of middle age and desparation, which gold couldn’t dispell. If I make one wrong move, Cersei thought with black humor, then come the morrow she’ll know a tale worthy of the songs.

She resolved to see to it that Senelle was arrested with her. If it should come to that. Senelle had helped her, she would say. Senelle had told her where a queen could go, and when, to bed her brother without risking discovery. And thinking it she felt a tenderness towards the girl, fierce as though she really had helped organize their trysts.

“Take this,” she said, removing a ring from her third finger. “As you have gone out of your way.” A little band of iron, set with garnets. Robert might even recognize the working: if he saw it sit on a strange hand.

 

The days passed without fatal incident, however, and she made arrangements with her father, there at court in the wake of Joffrey’s name day, to go with him to Casterly Rock. With Jaime, and the children. Who had never seen their ancestral home. That made him nod when she said it, though he was abstracted elsewise, reading letters even as he answered her. It was for the best. He would not have liked whatever he saw in her eyes.

Grand Maester Pycelle, by contrast, greeted her with familial warmth, which would have irritated her if she’d had less need of him. “Your Grace,” he said, “I hope you are well?” He was sitting at a table piled with scrolls, a dish of pomegranates balanced on the edge: his flabby hand plucked at dark seeds with a deftness quite divorced from arm and body. As though, in lieu of the natural limb, he kept a starving vulture up his sleeve.

“I am,” she said. “But I have heard tell that Lord Arryn is less so.”

The leaky eyes considered her. “It’s true,” he said, “that this very morning the Hand is taken ill. Maester Colemon is tending him. Some affliction of the gut… we who are in the winters of our lives must be wary of what we digest. Some learned men say it is the price of youthful excess, but it is my belief—nay, experience—”

“Maester,” she said, smiling, patient. He relented. That power remained to her. “Tell me about the Hand. Truthfully: how does he do?”

“Not well,” sighed Pycelle. “It has come on so suddenly, and he is not a young man. It is the fever that concerns me most. He was not lucid when Lady Arryn called me there.”

“Please tell her that my prayers are with her. I fear very much for Lady Arryn. Her lord husband has always been strong, but this…” She shook her head.

“Yes,” said Pycelle. He stroked his beard. His pale blue eyes had sharpened behind the film of water, but his fingers left juice-stains in the soft hairs of his chin, and no amount of secret knowledge could repair that innocence. The slyness which reigned in the withered old face, and beneath it, staring, the unnoticed splash of red.

She asked herself: what does he think I want? My father or brother to take the Hand’s high office? She would have sought it, she supposed, given time. But there was no point in emptying the position while Jaime still all but lived in the tilting yard. And Robert would never name their father to the post.

No, Jon Arryn might have done for another year, for three, had he turned a blind eye. Had he lived so long. He was an old man. He had ruled all through the long summer, during which period she had always smiled to see him about his work. Borrowing, building, owing, his broad back bent beneath the weight of a nation’s weak follies. And six million dragons in arrears. By an unusual conversion, they signified the spending of one stag.

“Was there anything else, Your Grace? Some cordials against sickness, for the children on their journey?”

“Just my good wishes,” she said. “For Arryn and his wife.”

And so saying she took leave of Pycelle. But the image remained with her: the Hand of the King a steed for every debt and disaster the realm had so far faced, and now, as he lay with a surgeon’s hand at his gut, his rider spilling off him, cursing and struggling, tearing off its helm. Doom unhorsed, made to go on foot, and touch again the earth. Never mind, she thought, laughing to herself, as she mounted the stair. Let chaos walk. Lord Arryn, you should have left me something more to fear.

 

“They say he’s calling my name,” Robert said.

“As I understand it, he’s calling for his son,” she said. “His wife will not bring him the boy.” Her courage was waning. She had found him just-awoken, picking at a sumptuous table; but the news had reached him, and though he sat almost prone on the couch in his solar, clad in a dressing gown and furry slippers, his eyes were clear, bitter and anxious, directed at an invisible midpoint between him and the man he said he loved. The Hand’s tower: close enough to the royal apartments that you could see dark figures in its windows. Far enough that you could comprehend its height. Like an upraised finger, extended in petition or rebuke. Robert’s gaze hovered somewhere over the courtyard beneath his rooms, but she imagined it inching along a tenuous silver line, tied at one end around the finger’s ruddy tip—a thread of guilt which would carry first his thoughts to Arryn’s bedside, and then his body.

And what would he hear there? She should have told Pycelle, suffocate him. Put a pillow to his beak.

“Cruel woman,” muttered Robert. Louder: “ _Someone_ should sit with him. When fighting off a fever, I have always found… It’s a blessing, to have someone speak to you, and draw out the pain.”

The pain or the truth. She thought, I could raise my skirt. Kiss him. It had been the idea in her mind, when she went to seek him out. She looked at Robert, slouching, mountainous, the robe rumpled and open, dark fur wild around his laboring jaws. She could do everything, and afterward he would feel guiltier. He would listen the more closely to Arryn’s delirium.

Besides. In an hour she would be gone.

“You have the right of it,” she said.

She was thinking, _A man does not marry his heir to his servant’s daughter._ And earlier than that, her father, telling her she would not have a sword, nor ever wield one. The shame and violence that filled up the space left by desire; the collusion between her opponents and her own inadequacy. A defeat that had no answer but in turning on herself. She tried to remember what she had done in the months following the Lannisport tourney. Become beautiful, by all accounts. And it hadn’t been so long after that that her bleeding came, too late to help her cause, though it ruined a yellow silk gown. She’d raged—not at the bleeding. At Aerys. In those days she only glimpsed her body’s faults, the terrible responsibility it bore for her losses, when she looked out the corner of her eye. But she knew she’d been cheated. If that girl was incapable of salvation, at least she had regretted it and fought. Had conceived, too late, of the thousand things she should have done to make her suit more sound.

This then was the difference between Cersei and a child: weaponless, she felt mainly relief. Thank the gods, she thought, that there is no recourse. Not in fucking or holding him back.

And it might be that she had settled the matter by recruiting Pycelle. The Hand was delirious and in some agony, he had not gathered all the proof he wanted, and what he said would escape him as the ravings of a dying man. Or she had not; and Robert would pursue her all the long way to the Rock. Her fate, like a living body, was a machine too variable to mend in its last hours. So turn the key, and see how it would run.

“Cersei?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was considering. Would you want your children there, were you so afflicted? To watch you suffering...”

“You barely let them near me when I’m hale.”

“Me? How could I keep them from you?” She turned aside and made a gesture like she was washing her hands. When he died, she thought briefly, she would send all his bastards with him. The whore’s daughter, the apprentice smith, the serving woman’s twins gone on ahead. He would not want for company, when he lay fevered in the hells.

“This trip of yours—”

“They are long overdue for a taste of their Lannister ancestry.”

Robert stood up. Confusion had covered his crisp resolve. No doubt, knowing her well, he’d expected an argument against his sitting vigil. It was not as though their marriage had taught him how speech could lighten pain. Presumably he’d been thinking of his whores. And Robert liked a fight, liked a brawl: she sometimes thought that was the reason he’d kept her these long years. Not because he feared war with the Lannisters, but because he enjoyed it. The gods knew there had been efforts to replace her. But their marriage, their marriage; sometimes it seemed that it would stand when they were dust. Their particles drifting in the same long courses: parry and thrust, barter and plead, withhold, withhold, withhold.

“I would be alone with him,” he said. As if she were on the point of following. Distractedly, he shed his gown, and went looking for a doublet. She did trail him to his bedchamber. She watched him cross the room naked, back and forth, picking out garments at random. Where was Lancel? Shirt, embroidered doublet, hose—he stopped with one boot on and no breeches, perhaps realizing he’d confounded the order.

She opened the curtains. The blue, deep, impervious sky threw its whole weight into the room; was reflected in icy planes on Robert’s back and arms. It was hotter at noonday, in the castle, than any hell that Cersei could imagine—hotter than the steaming bowels of a fresh kill, when hunters had cut apart the hind, exposed the knotted entrails. But she would not dismiss the idea that in him there was a guarantee of cold. The light-blue gloss on his ample shoulders, the smooth white lumps that marked each muscle’s grave: for a moment she perceived him as the soldier he’d been, dead in a field, entombed by falling snow.

“Go,” she said, shortly thereafter. He was already halfway out the door; he made no farewell. Alone, she sat down at the table in his solar, and set herself to finishing his feast.

 

Three weeks of travel took them to the Rock. The raven was waiting for her.

That night, after the children had been put to bed, their exploration of the castle ended for the evening, she met Jaime in the rooms he had had when they were young, now long empty. “We’re safe,” she told him, spreading her arms. He was unusually serious, and kissed the well of her elbow, the inward stretch of her forearm, and then her palm. She cupped her hand to his mouth and spun him around, his back to her, resting her face in his hair.

“Cersei,” he said, lips ticklish, puff of breath branding; she slipped her other hand around his chest and pulled up the front of his tunic. Her hand flattened against his belly, and dropped to land below the belt. Then she let him go, and he stumbled, turned, caught himself on the wall, and touched his mouth. She came to him and kissed him. Kissed his ear and throat, feeling his half-hard cock and trimly muscled thigh through the thin stuff of his breeches. He was sliding down the wall, one knee deliberately folding—his head fallen back hard and with a sound. In the dim, ornate bedroom, all was conveyed by a total sufficiency of the senses: movement, pale ghosting forms. The indecent rasp of his sighs. She knelt and put her mouth on him without undoing his belt. She held his tunic’s hem back from her hair, like she might have a gown.

Later they curled in each other’s arms, on the dusty sheets of a bed that wanted either airing or burning, and for the first time in many years she thought: I would have made a woman of him. If she had been the god that oversaw their tempering, who forged them from the metal of one blade. It was not that she wanted him to be unhappy. But she thought she could have done more for him, in the end, than he could for her. For their family.

He had told her long ago about the day that Aerys died. Had said, Ned Stark, you know; he found me sitting the throne. Resting my arse. And because she had been so glad to have him with her, free from the mad king and the threat of fire, she had not voiced the thought that blazed up in her mind. She had not said, my brother, you are brave and beautiful, so who was it that taught you to retreat?

Not her. If she could have, she would have burned it out of him.

She envisioned herself in Jaime’s golden mail. How her gloved arm would shoot out, blood erupting from the sword’s point like the first blossoms of spring. Aerys with his eyes raised, abject, pale green and flecked with gold, hair pouring milk-white down his back; in her mind she stabbed him again. Twice, thrice. For Jaime, she thought, for Rhaegar. For letting Robert win.

She imagined climbing the steps to the throne. The sword at her waist a bar of crimson, as though she carried not the weapon but the wound.

When she woke, some hours later than she meant to, Jaime was still behind her. She felt his hand beneath her breasts, his cock pressing into her back, and she turned her head back until she could see the window, latticed and curtainless: where dawn had launched a wan assault against the charcoal sky. There was, in the window, a tree already lit, as though housing a bonfire beneath its gnarled roots. The undersides of leaves dyed pink, the higher buds still dark but but light enough to threaten green. She could smell it through stone. The sharp, sweet sap, warmed to boiling by an unrisen sun, which dreamed in secret underground, and thawed the blood of trees and buried things.

Pycelle said summer was all but done. Eaten up with tourneys and festivals, the fattening purses of whores. But when I was a child, she thought, we had seasons of just three years. Summer gone before it came, and all we did was prosper. Her father inviting her to his solar—his thin hand in her hair.

She would suggest to Robert that he name Jaime Hand. Summer had been Jon Arryn’s time, Robert’s time, and they had squandered it. Now the world would see that a lion could do more, in darkness and ice, than the stag had in a decade of high noon. She had thought that it must wait until Jaime wanted it, but Jaime, who yielded the throne to Eddard Stark’s bannermen, who for years had stood outside Robert’s rooms while Robert fucked her, would never advance without her drawing him on. And Robert… yes, it pleased her husband to surround himself with foes, with all the rings of Lannisters he had arranged around his court; so let him raise up his oldest rival, his sworn sword, the man who had made of him a cuckold and a king.

“Jaime.” She saw his eyes open. “I love you,” she said, thinking of Jon Arryn, who had died the day after they left. His wife pretending to shed tears on the sleeve of his warm corpse. Cersei, more candid, climbed atop her brother. “I love you. I love you.” He touched her hand. She said, “No one has ever loved someone so much.” 


	4. THE STRANGER

It was Tyrion who put the notion in her head. “Don’t trouble yourself, sweet sister,” he’d said when Robert left her and their entourage standing in the mud, while he and Ned Stark went down to visit a rock. “Our king must at this moment be reminding himself how blessed he is, to be married to you and not a statue.”

He’d been three years at court, but at court it was possible to avoid one another. And he was, besides, much out of the citadel, being almost as liberal as Robert in the funding and maintenance of brothels. The journey north had been their first period of prolonged companionship since she was turned sixteen. Every day it unsettled her to see him, smiling, lopsided, dressed in the colors of their house. “Have a care for the feelings of our host,” she said. She was not a girl, incapable of curbing her anger, but for a moment she wished she had the advantages of girlhood. Privacy and darkness—his little worthless body defenseless beneath her hand. Above all she missed the days when he could not yet speak.

Jaime said, “How could Stark complain? Tyrion flatters his dead sister just by comparing you.” And he shot Tyrion an ironic glance, as if to say, _don’t_ you? Tyrion nodded, solemnly.

“In any case,” he said, “the Starks are tasteful corpse-keepers. Below ground, out of the way. It’s not as if they made you look at her. With some of these northern houses, I hear, you’d have to watch for her skin on the wall.”

“That’s if we ever get indoors,” said Jaime. But Tyrion’s eyes were locked on hers.

She did not fear, and had not ever feared, Lyanna Stark’s last remains. Whatever Tyrion thought he had seen in her expression, when Robert said he would _pay his respects_ , he had misjudged it. Nor would the challenge in his uneven stare have been enough to move her. But she was also curious, and though she had never given Robert the satisfaction of knowing she wondered about the woman he and Rhaegar had chased—she could indulge her interest here without her husband finding out.

It wasn’t difficult, stealing into the crypt later that week. It was night. There was no watchman, and nothing, she supposed, even to be taken from the sepulchres, unless you craved a rusty blade and a dead Stark’s lasting curse. She had thought that the most recent lords would be placed near the stairs, but instead the line of statues began with the Kings of Winter. Their aspect worn almost back to an uncarved anonymity, with the features clarifying as she went on, until she reached men who resembled the living Stark. Even down to their scowls.

She would have thought the dead would be harder to reach when they’d been gone three millennia. But to the Starks, it seemed, death was a cumulative distance, with every soul advancing further through the wastes. Pushed onward by their predecessors, or given aid at the small waystations of souls who’d blazed the trail first.

Lyanna was the only woman. Cersei wondered for a moment where the other she-wolves had been buried, but the question answered itself: with their husbands. There were flowers in Lyanna’s lap where all the lords and kings had swords, and a wreath of blossoms propped on her stone head. Her face, beneath the interwoven stems, wavered by torchlight; her nose now monstrously long, now barely distinguishable from the level of her cheeks, and the egg-blank eyes disappearing entirely when Cersei lifted her torch to see the wreath. Marigolds, pansies, daisies, but no roses. A sore spot, perhaps? She smiled. But it was impossible, from that superior position, to assess the dead girl’s beauty, with the shadows washing down her cheeks and chin like blackened blood. She lowered the torch. She held it so close to the dark stone face that she thought she saw a skin of frost, previously undetected, turning slick and frangible from heat—and indeed, after a moment’s consideration, pinheads of liquid began to roll down the sloping long jaw.

No, she thought, surprised. Not beautiful. In fact, plain. Almost sexless from the blunting of granite. Of course, some of that might be down to the artist. The memory of the commisioner, who was the lady’s brother and not her love. Still it almost overwhelmed Cersei, to have confirmation of what she’d always told herself was true. That Rhaegar had thrown his kingdom away for nothing. That Robert had gone to war for nothing, except his life and pride.

She felt measured triumph, and a great grief. “You did kill him,” she said, putting her hand on Lyanna’s cheek. She left it there. Cradled the hard, damp, undeserving face until it absorbed a little of her warmth; and then, rather belatedly, noticed the crown was burning.

There was a period of activity, in which she hardly knew what she would do, and then she had put the flowers out, and very nearly the torch. The flowers weren’t much singed, except for the bursting red pansy that had caught alight, and which was now no more than a black knot chained by embers. Her fingertips stung from the flames. She sucked on them, cursing, took them out of her mouth, blew on pink pads, and then without transition began to laugh. “Your point, damn you,” she said. “Your bloody hit.”

As a form of experiment, she set the wreath on her own head. Ash crumbled and landed on her white breasts. No, that wouldn’t do. She thrust the torch as far up as her arm would go, so that nothing of Lyanna showed except the flat of her stone hair, and returned her crown to her. But there was no remedying through adornment the problem of her looks. Well, Cersei thought, if the madness was in Rhaegar, it was in him—and she knew how grotesque things could tempt, when they were absolutely in your power.

 

She did not remember when exactly it had happened. Not the day. She could guess the year. Their mother had been alive, perhaps just pregnant, and she and Jaime were perfectly happy when their tutors did not keep them apart. One day they had fled their lessons to go ranging through the hills, weaving between the great oaks and fording brooks with their sandals tied to their waists. They were still of an age to hope, uncertainly, for wild lions, though lions seemed less likely to persist in secret than dragons or krakens, which might retreat for a thousand years into caves or the fathomless sea. Lions were brave. But a very old one, they reasoned, would last a while in the labyrinth of valleyed woods, and emerge to greet its natural heirs; and if it was so old, they’d be able to kill it easily.

In the meantime they practiced on each other. One of them would pick up a long trailing branch to make a spear; the other would run forward, bare hands crooked.

Jaime had been the knight that day, and she the lion. They had their match on the shore of a beck almost wide enough for a name. Normally he was undaunted by her sudden feints, and would stand with feet set wide to counter them; but that day, laughing, he retreated from each abortive lunge, his branch held at the level of her heart. Then she went for his knees, fingers hooked and menacing, and he swung away, towards the edge, his heel landing on a stone that pitched him backwards. He fell in the brook. Twisted in mid-air, so that he landed not on his arse but on his side, and he could catch himself with an outflung arm. The water was deeper than either of them had imagined.

“Jaime,” she said, breaking her role, and went to fish him up. With her assistance he rose up gasping, his knee skinned and hand alarmingly bloody. Two fingers sprained, the knuckles cut to dark red blots, as though he’d been brawling with stable boys. It was strange that he could have landed so badly in a stream that would leave your waist dry if you stood in it upright; but then the bottom was loose shale and white schist, you could see that much through the faceted green eddies, and he had not, while falling, let go of the branch. As though he thought he might need it underwater, to fight the cold and current and the fish. The dark leeches that curled wherever water stilled. “To think I thought I was escaping a bath,” Jaime said, “coming out here,” and threw his burden aside.

“You know how lions bathe, don’t you?” she asked later, and when he looked at her questioningly she took his injured hand in hers. “Not in streams, if you’re worried.” They were sitting on the bank, surrounded by grass and oak leaves, hard as copper wingcases, like a swarm of locusts had lain down there for respite. When she moved they crackled. “Like this,” she said, licking his palm, where the blood had trickled inward to form little red roads. His arm jerked, and she supposed it must have hurt him; but she held his wrist, gentle as she could, and set her tongue to the webbing of thumb and forefinger, until he sighed and let her turn over his hand to clean the knuckles. He tasted of salt and the impurities in the water. When she lingered on his parted, quivering fingers, his eyes fluttered shut, his soft mouth opened, and if she could have, she supposed, she would have kept him there. Wounded and blind, with his wet skin brightly armored in the fading afternoon.

None of this passed through her mind when Joffrey came to tell her of the Stark girl’s assault. When he said, “Must I marry her, Mother?”—meaning the other sister, too cowardly to either attack or defend, but then it was not as if she’d ever met a pair of siblings who kept quite separate their sins. Somewhere in Sansa, there was a wildness. No. It was only when Eddard Stark said, “If it must be done, I will do it,” that she thought of that long-ago adventure. Jaime had even lost his branch to the stream, if she remembered rightly. Like Lion’s Tooth it was carried away. Seven hells, Cersei thought, if our children are destined to inherit _our_ hurts—magnified, like money is, by time and interest? But Stark still had no right to look aggrieved. If it had not been her, but the lion they’d sought, who bit Jaime by the stream: why then Lord Tywin would have ridden out in a hunting party the size of a corps, and brought back the animal’s head.

 

The amusing thing, as she considered it, was that Jon Arryn had frightened her most. Seventy if he was a day, felled by a rich meal and a dutiful maester, and yet he was the one she’d almost missed. The same could not be said for Ned Stark, whose pity preceded him like a thunderous noise—and certainly not for her husband, the beast she’d stalked for a dozen years, the promise of his white underbelly leading her on through the brush. Or say it was the other way, and he’d chased her with horses and hounds and a spear she had put in his hand; only to find, at the end of his hunt, that his quarry had turned on him. That he was all along the animal that had been trapped, bought, imported, groomed, and let out ahead of the dogs.

And now he was dying. Charged, she thought, charged by a boar, with all his accounts sadly overdrawn. Was it a virgin, she wondered, laughing; that poor beast, dead and unspoiled—or had it fathered a litter of piglets? She pictured them rooting in the kingswood, orphaned and dressed in mourning black. Growing fat on white-capped mushrooms that had themselves sprung up round fallen stags.

They roused her when he was carried back to the castle, though in truth she had not slept long. Triumph unsettled her mind as much as doubt. But she decanted herself in all due disarray, hastening to his bedside; and was rewarded by the sight of the awful wound, and Pycelle with a glittering needle.

“Cersei,” the king groaned. He was open and on his back, and he sounded as he had often done when their positions were reversed. She sat down at the edge of the mattress. “By the gods, I can feel my guts falling out. Faster, Pycelle, damn you.” His teeth were rubies in his mouth, to her delight.

“Your Grace, I must make stitches close enough to stay the…” Pycelle’s voice petered out. There was nothing to be stayed, the man well knew.

She took Robert’s thick hand and kissed the knuckle. His finger, crooked into a claw beneath her lips. She had once thought it was a pity that she would never see him grow old, or experience for herself the departure of his faculties, but this was better than any slow descent: this corrosion, in one hour, of all his few remaining graces, his claim to manhood. How his breast heaved, his back arching, when Pycelle pulled a stitch taut.

Next to them Renly paced like the impatient ghost of Robert’s prime. His hands in his hair, his wide eyes pulled ineluctably back to the site of the goring. She was surprised at how well he was standing the stink. He gave it, against all odds, a domestic atmosphere, which she and the king alone could not produce. Perhaps, if the prince had been there—but she did not want Joffrey to look at the wound, or try and touch it. It was unnecessary, in any case. Joffrey had accomplished what she had never managed, which was to become a man's heir simply by dressing as his son.

Something her dwarf of a brother had said to Jaime, in his cups, when the royal procession stopped at a septry by the wayside on the road to Winterfell: the Seven were a family. The beautiful children, the insipid parents, a grandmother with a clanking lamp, and the one man in the house who ever got anything done: it was clear as day, and never mind the business of unity. That being so evident—it being above all things easy to imagine the gods clustered around their sun-fed hearth, roasting souls—did it not follow that when death knocked, they let it in as a long-lost relation?

And sat it by the flames, to warm itself.

Servants went back and forth, stoking the twin fires at each end of the bedchamber. Heat to expel infection; heat to purify the space. She’d like to see the babe this union bore. Robert was talking incoherently about the pig, and how at least he had killed it. Even as it ran him through. “You mustn’t speak so,” she said, with enormous benevolence, kissing his nails and palm. “You will live, my lord. You will heal, and regain your strength, and walk tall again.” The words came pouring out of her like blood. His hands were the last clean part of his body, but she would dirty them, with her fine speech. “For the love you bear me—”

“Oh, shut up,” said Robert.

There was a little silence. Pycelle knotted off the seam.

“Mother have mercy,” Robert said. He craned his neck up, trying to assess the damage, but it was a high hill his eyes had to surmount to approach the base of his belly, and Pycelle was already wrapping new bandages around the gash. Much good they’d do. A moment later, one length of black thread snapped. “Hells,” said Robert, closing his eyes. “Ned. Where’s my steward? Send him. The king requires his Hand.”

When you are dead, she thought, all that will remain of you will be the wrongs that you have done me. Every sin, every slight, every slap: they will be your children when your bastards are wiped out. They will burn in me, as reminders of what I can withstand. No one who remembers you gently will be allowed to live. But I will be glad, I will be most happy, to preserve all the lowest parts of you; to keep your sloth and lechery, your foolishness and wrath, and let the shreds of honor follow flesh into the mud.

On the road to Casterly Rock she had had a recurring nightmare about the king and Jon Arryn's last conversation, although in it she never heard what passed between them after Robert closed the door. The start and end of the dream was Robert on the threshold: Robert pausing to gather himself outside Jon Arryn’s chamber. Robert straightening, absurdly, when the steward gave his titles, and then—he would change. The fear and stupidity running from his face, like clouds driven off by strong wind. He would be calm, brave, sober but for the hint of daring in the corner of his straight mouth, that shadow of wildness which was itself a form of fierce control; and being so he would go in to hear Jon Arryn’s truths. His hand at the door, firm and pale, and a word on his lips of greeting or assurance. I have loved you, always loved you. You have been as a father to me.

But of course he had not—heard Jon Arryn’s anything. That insight had been reserved for Eddard Stark: who, dutifully receiving it, had gone at first to her.

Now he stood in the doorway, not quite upright. “Lord Eddard Stark,” said the steward, “Hand of the King.” The hand, had the king but known it, that struck him down. Stark was being supported by two of his armsmen, but she did not think his pallor had its origins in his leg.

“Bring him here,” Robert said, strident as ever, though blood seeped from the corner of his mouth.

The armsmen nearly carried Stark to stand beside the bed. He looked ill in the doubled light of the fires, and worse when he saw Robert: he staggered, so that for a moment it was as if Jaime and his men were there in the room, thrusting home the spear a second time. It pleased her as always to see that what her brother could do, she could multiply. Jaime had wanted so much to kill Robert, to step in his blood; but he was halfway to Casterly Rock, and he would never know what it was to sit in this smoky, reeking room, seeing Robert's last friend accept his fate. She could almost taste his frustration. His absence a chill at her foot. But it was right that she should have this, and for herself alone. She did not regret any of what had passed or would. She had chosen correctly from start to finish, and this, Robert's death by pig and friendly pity, was salve enough for all the wounds incurred.

Stark's long face seemed worked in flickering shadow. His hands fell once to clutch his bandaged thigh. When he looked away, the gray eyes glittered with what she recognized, with a little bubble of hilarity, as profound grief. They were eyes of much the same color as his dead sister’s in the crypt, though expressive, bloodshot, full of hope and rage.

And yet, she thought, it's you who's killed his king, just as surely as Lyanna did Rhaegar. How many years was it now, since the wolf bitch met a prince's gaze when he had won his joust—and he rode toward Lyanna, only her, past the watchful, breathless world, with his gloved hands bearing the fragile crown?

 

It was later. There came a faint knock at her door.

Littlefinger had only just left. She was seated by her desk, the glass lamp lit, dressed in what was perhaps her favorite gown—a cascade of sea-green silk and lace that coated the floor like frothy surf. It was the last hour of Robert’s life, although he slept, peacefully, under the auspices of wine and the poppy. The sun was some time risen, but the sky outside her window seemed as cloudy as on the day of her wedding. And that knock, that timid knock: she stood, smiling, to answer it.

“Your Grace, I would speak to you,” said Sansa Stark.

My god, Cersei thought, has she come to savage me? Like that brat of a she-wolf did Joffrey? But the girl had been crying, it appeared, not practicing with sticks or swords, and she carried herself like a supplicant. Thirteen, but almost Cersei’s height. Her eyes red as her hair. Her hair piled on her small head in the fashion that Cersei had popularized. Like a taste of a future in which the world was populated solely by Cersei's children. Without her husband, without his bastards living; even her fiercest enemies would be heir to her flesh.

“I didn’t know who else to tell,” Sansa was saying. “It’s my father, he…”

“Sit,” said Cersei, not letting excitement color her tone. “Sweet Sansa.” She drew her chair close to the padded one Sansa took, and laced her hands together on her knees, a woman in prayer. “What is it you have to say to me?”

She saw Sansa’s eye float up, bright and blue as a rose, and then drop back to her lap. “He’s sending me away.” And then, like a dam had broken: “Oh, Your Grace, don’t let him do it. Tell him I must stay here, I must be with Prince Joffrey… my father doesn’t understand, he says he’ll marry me to someone else, he can’t see that I love the prince with all my heart.” Tears had begun to flow again, but behind the sheen of woe the girl’s face was sharp, eager, aware of the effect of her words. At least—in part. Cersei did not think anybody could have grasped the full depth of her feelings in that moment.

“Poor child,” she said, “you were right to come.” She stroked, on impulse, Sansa’s flat cheek, which colored prettily. She wondered if Sansa could make out the outline of her own fading bruise. “When do you leave? Today, I suppose?”

“This eve,” said Sansa, welling up again. She would be doing more of that in the coming days. It was fortunate that she wept without destroying her own looks—the flush clashed with her hair, but it also lent her a startling vividness, which stood in contrast to her studied poise. Though it had something, too, of the obscene in it. A soft distortion. “Father bought us passage on a ship going north, my sister and I, and he’s not even going with us…”

These gentle wolves, thought Cersei. Helping each other down into the dark.

“Be at ease,” she told her visitor, when she had extracted the rest of Stark’s plans for the household. “I will speak to your father. If necessary, the king as well.” Not that Joff would want Sansa to stay. The image of her son’s face, handsome even in pain and disgust, swam before her eyes—laid distastefully alongside the thought of the butcher's boy the Hound had cut in half. “I will make clear to him that you are to stay here, at court, to beautify our halls.”

“And wed Joffrey,” Sansa said. Her coy agitation had slipped. She was serious, pink-nosed and stern, like a judge before giving his ruling. It had not in truth been a question; but Cersei, sensible of her debts, said, “Yes. Of course you will marry him.”


End file.
